Between Spanish Harlem, Funky Colón, and Black Rio. Soul, Migration of Music, and Translocal Identity Constructions in the Black Power Era (1965-1975)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wilfried Raussert
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290430412

The project proposes to explore the role of Soul music - which was closely linked to the rise of the African American freedom movement in the USA in the 1960s - for the reception of Black Power discourses and the formation of black identity movements in Latin America. In the light of recent debates on the transnational dimensions of African American movements and cultures, transculturations in the Western Hemisphere and the relations between music migration and identity constructions, the genre Soul shall be examined for its role asmanifestation of a new black consciousness raised in the context of Civil Rights and Black Power movements. This project will outline how Soul with its symbolic representations of black pride was received across the US borders as a soundtrack for the departure of the African Americans into a new era, arguing that it had a significant role in the transnationalization of the Black Power Movement. By focusing on the translocal distribution of Soul in urban Latin American contexts during the peak phase of the movement between 1965 and 1975, it will explore a largely unstudied aspect of inter-American cultural transfers and and contribute to the bridging of existing demarcations between African American and Latin American studies. As the investigation aims to shed light on the multidimensional implications of the collective consumption of Soul at different sites (Marcus 1995) and within overlapping scapes (Appadurai 2000), it recurs on methodological approaches which serve to conceptualize the mobility of cultural practices, discourses, and actors. Based on the analysis of soul, which is often overlooked by its political dimensions, we will examine how and through which ways this genre contributed to transferring messages and aesthetic manifestations of the Black Power Movement in Afro-hairstyles, clothing, and slogans such as Black isbeautiful, to Latin American localities and how these collided with the dominant mestizaje- and democracia racial-ideologies. Besides the diffusion of these symbols and contents through the expansion of the record industry, the role of translocal actors as musicians, DJs, and activists is crucial here. By highlighting the forms of appropriating Soul in the West-Indian communities of Colón (Panama) and the Brazilian Black Rio-movement as well as the significant importance of the migrant neighborhood Spanish Harlem in New York as the hemispheric centre of Afro-diasporic transculturation, an underexplored chapter of the globalization of Afro-US-American cultural goods shall be analyzed in various locations of the hemispheric exchange processes and in its relations to the divergent connotations of nation, race, and ethnicity origin within the respective societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants