Download PDF Sonidos Negros On the Blackness of Flamenco Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music K Meira Goldberg 9780190466923 Books

Product details Series Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music Paperback 320 pages Publisher Oxford University Press (January 2, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0190466928

Sonidos Negros On the Blackness of Flamenco Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music K Meira Goldberg 9780190466923 Books Reviews

• This book is an impressive, original, highly interpretive exploration of the complexities and contradictions of Spanish cultural identity and the role of flamenco therein. At its heart is a set of Spanish historical (especially 17-19th c.) ambivalences and contradictory attitudes, including an obsession with purity of blood, a hypersensitivity to European conceptions of Spain as the ethnic/racial “Other,” and—in the 19th c.--a paradoxical nationalistic embracing of that Otherness in the form of flamenco. Goldberg argues that flamenco and its main exponents, the Roma (gitanos/Gypsies), represented a form of Blackness, itself linked in various ways to slavery, colonialism, and ideals of lasciviousness, resistance, and other values. To make this case, she draws on an extraordinary wealth of primary source material, from dance manuals and travelers’ accounts to theoretical writings on blackface minstrelsy. These materials alone make the book an engaging read for those interested in Spanish vernacular culture and flamenco.