Música Típica
Cumbia and the Rise of Musical Nationalism in Panama
Description:... "This book tells the story of a form of music that enjoys unparalleled popularity in a country that itself possesses instant name recognition but is very little known and very little studied. Panamanian mâusica tâipica or cumbia, as this music is also called, is intrinsically linked to the social and political history of a sliver of land that connects North and South America while providing passage between two great oceans. I show that to appreciate mâusica tâipica is to appreciate the development of the Isthmian crossing, the construction of the Panama Canal, the movement of people along this corridor and, most significantly, the lives of rural people living along its banks and deeper in the Panamanian interior. In this work, I draw on both archival and ethnographic research to reconstruct a 20th-century social history of Panamanian mâusica tâipica. I examine mâusica tâipica in relation to the rise of populist Panamanian nationalism that often equated cosmopolitanism and Afro-Panamanian cultural influence with U.S. imperialism. Notwithstanding its widespread national popularity and identification with rural society, mâusica tâipica has infrequently been embraced as a form of official musical nationalism. Its links to Panamanian nationalist sentiment are often indirect and profoundly ambiguous. In focusing on musicians and their approaches to musical fusion, varied performance strategies, and the forging of links to both rural and urban economies, I show how mâusica tâipica performers were not only central to the development of a sense of nationhood, but also actively cultivated performance identities that straddled some the most pronounced schisms in Panamanian society of the period"--
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