Tuesday, July 9, 2019, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

PABLO PALOMINO, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Oxford College of Emory University

“The Making of Latin American as a Cultural Region: Identity and Otherness from a Musical Perspective”

Latin America is less an objective reality than the history of the multiple projects that attempted to create a region out of the intrinsic heterogeneity of the New World. Underlying these projects, a surprisingly wide set of musical practices was crucial to create an enduring idea of Latin American culture and identity. The aesthetic category “Latin American music,” in particular, consolidated the cultural identity of this region by connecting highbrow and lowbrow traditions, folk and erudite, popular and commercial music across disparate cultural streams—national, Iberian, European, Pan-American, African, and Indigenous. Based on his upcoming book, The Invention of Latin American Music (Oxford University Press), Pablo’s talk will invite us to reflect on our geo-cultural assumptions from a musical perspective.