Conference Agenda

In this presentation, I investigate how affective music performance and community organizing structure the work of the cantadora Elena Hinestroza in the black migrant communities of Cali, Colombia. Cantadoras are traditional singers of Afro-Colombian music who are the matriarchs of rural Colombian Pacific communities. Hinestroza operates La Azotea de la Abuela in eastern Cali, a cultural performance and meeting space located in the rooftop of her home that hosts Pacific Music workshops for local youth and traditional nightlong musical ceremonies called arrullos, in addition to community and government meetings. I posit that La Azotea is a location where Pacific Music performance (re)produces a politics of black cultural preservation, and that the affective resonances of Afro-Colombian music performance are vital to sustaining the symbolic capital through which Hinestroza performs community advocacy, and furthermore, that La Azotea is a political space where cantadoras reassert their authority to regulate intercommunal and intra-communal relationships. Hinestroza and her collaborators also adapt traditional Afro-Colombian voice pedagogies to compose a contemporary urban song repertoire informed by their experiences of internal displacement. I argue that these songs establish a shared meaning of place for black migrants and their descendants by speaking to their collective memories of the rural Colombian Pacific and current struggles against racial segregation Cali. This presentation is in dialogue with recent sociological and Black Feminist scholarship on black Pacific cultural expression in Cali, and contributes ethnomusicological analysis of performance genealogies and the affective voice.

This paper delves into how sonic and musical experience contributes to espiritismo marialioncero’s (Venezuelan spiritism) formulation of spiritual intensity, or a principle better known as fuerza. Spectacularizing approaches have justified persecution of religious practitioners since the 1950s by describing espiritismo as a "cult to violence" or a scam with negative influences on Venezuelan society (Barreto 2020, Ferrándiz 2004, Taussig 1997). The forceful character of spirit possession is a central concern as it signals a fracture between different understandings of subjectivity, humanity and violence. While for espiritistas marialionceros this ritual is desired and transformative, others see it as threatening and abhorrent (Crosson 2019). I argue that we can explore this epistemological impasse most effectively by interrogating the role of intensity as a threshold between the ordinary and extraordinary. As such, I show how espiritistas also defy long-standing scholarly paradigms for the study of violence that rely on derivative ideals of personhood, individual autonomy (Scarry 1985), and agency. Through (auto)ethnographic engagement, I study espiritistas’ methodical curation of the intensities of sound, sights and temperatures to propitiate the fuerza needed for intervention into legacies of unbelonging and suffering. Ultimately, fuerza illuminates espiritista human/non-human solidarities that profoundly modify how this religious community inhabits Venezuela’s contemporary crisis.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in São José do Belmonte, a rural community in the backlands of Pernambuco, this talk examines how grassroots initiatives linked to the Armorial Movement, a multifaceted artistic project spearheaded by playwright, novelist, and scholar Ariano Suassuna (1927–2014) have empowered residents of Belmonte to effect change through what political anthropologist James Holston terms insurgent citizenship. I explore how the Stone of the Kingdom Association has served as a site for the performance of citizenship by cultivating networks of belonging through participatory cultural activities, such as the Stone of the Kingdom Celebration. This event is an equestrian pilgrimage to Pedra do Reino, a historical site where, in 1838, a group of religious zealots, followers of Sebastianismo, a messianic ideology centered on the prophesied return of Dom Sebastião (1554–1578), King of Portugal, carried out a massacre in hopes of bringing about the monarch’s return. Taking the Stone of the Kingdom Celebration as a point of departure, I demonstrate how members of the Stone of the Kingdom Association embrace Suassuna’s Armorial universe as a means of performing cultural identity and citizenship, re-signifying the historic site of Pedra do Reino into a space of cultural and political significance.