Description: Rites, Rights & Rhythms traces traditional Afro-Colombian currulao music from colonial slavery to today's black social movement. The book illuminates a history of struggles over the music's meanings, portraying one of the hemisphere's most important black cultures, and offering a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao.
Review Quotes: This wonderful ethnography is poignantly place-specific, meticulously aware of history, and convincingly post-structuralist as it reveals formations of blackness in never-ending processes of change, renovation, and reinvention within specific power configurations. --Jean Muteba Rahier, author of Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival
"Rites, Rights, and Rhythms is a landmark study in ethnomusicology. It combines sensitive, profound ethnography with a depth of historical insight that is a model for scholars working in any area of the discipline. At the same time, it offers a perspective on the shifting philosophical and material investments in race over time in Colombia that scholars of music and modernity will need to grapple with." --Gabriel Solis, Professor of Music, African American Studies, and Anthropology, University of Illinois