La música como herramienta política de los condenados: un acercamiento a la bomba puertorriqueña.

Music as a Political Tool of the Condemned: An Approach to the Puerto Rican Bomba.

BOMBA (Dance); DANCE; PUERTO Rican music; POWER (Social sciences); RESISTANCE to government; GROUP identity; RACE identity

Puerto Rican bomba is part of a constructed and institutionalized historical heritage that requires a decolonial look. This essay rehearses a rapprochement towards a genre that transcends being posited as merely "national culture." I will demonstrate how bomba can be the subject of what Aníbal Quijano calls "the coloniality of power:" simultaneously an instrument of subversion and of resistance, or a tool of decolonial political and identity struggles. I will then address the issue of including this music in the racialized creation of "puertorricanness." I will examine how this discursive apparatus emerges out of a state-sponsored racialized identity. Finally, I will explain how bomba is not simply a music or a dance genre, but a way of seeing the world, of expressing oneself politically, and of crafting historical memory of "the other," an other that has been further "othered" by the state and by Puerto Rican society more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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