"Puerto Rico is often depicted as a ""racial democracy"" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderon criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaeton's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora."
By:
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 18mm
Weight: 476g
ISBN: 9780822359456
ISBN 10: 0822359456
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 02 October 2015
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments ix Iintroduction. Reggaetón Takes Its Place 1 1. Iron Fist against Rap 21 2. The Perils of Perreo 52 3. Loíza 81 4. Fingernails con Feeling 104 5. Enter the Hurbans 130 Conclusion. Reggaetón’s Limits, Possibilities, and Futures 159 Notes 171 Bibliography 199 Index 215
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.
Reviews for Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau does an outstanding job explaining the contradictory power dynamics behind the representations of blackness in Puerto Rico. In exploring the ways in which racial identities get re-structured, re-organized, and even elided through the music industry, Rivera-Rideau provides a significant contribution and a brilliant intervention into studies on race, blackness, and popular music in Puerto Rico. --Frances Aparicio, author of Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures
