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The Black Pacific: Cuban and Brazilian Echoes in the Afro-Peruvian Revival Author(s): Heidi Carolyn Feldman Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring/Summer, 2005), pp. 206-231 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20174376 Accessed: 23-04-2015 16:03 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Thu, 23 Apr 2015 16:03:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Vol. 49, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2005 The Black Pacific: Cuban and Brazilian Echoes in the Afro-Peruvian Revival Heidi Carolyn Feldman / University of California, San Diego The globalization of vernacular forms means that our understanding of antiphony .. will have to change .The original call is becoming harder to locate. If we one to make privilege it over the subsequent sounds that compete with another the most appropriate reply, we will have to remember that these communicative gestures are not expressive of an essence that exists outside of the acts which to as perform them and thereby transmit the structures of racial feeling wider, yet uncharted, worlds. (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic)1 The Black Pacific Gilroy's influential book The Black Atlantic (1993) challenged the and Paul public to imagine a cultural world that connects Africa, Europe, the Americas through the circulating expressive forms and shared'structures of feeling" (in Raymond Williams'terms) of the African diaspora. At the same time, it left uncharted the experience of countries in the black Pacific such as Peru. Expanding upon Gilroy's important model, I use the term "black Pacific" to describe a newly imagined diasporic community on the periphery of the black Atlantic. According to Gilroy, citizens of the black Atlantic ex press a "counterculture of modernity" (because enslaved Africans and their descendants are neither part of nor outside ofWestern modernism) through their critically marginal "double consciousness"2 (in which they self-identify as both "black"3 and as members ofWestern nations). I suggest that the black Pacific inhabits a similarly ambivalent space in relationship to Gilroy's black Atlantic. While black Atlantic double consciousness results from dual iden tification with pre-modern Africa and the modern West, the black Pacific negotiates ambiguous relationships with local cre?le and indigenous cultures and with the black Atlantic itself. ? 2005 by the Society for Ethnomusicology 206 This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Thu, 23 Apr 2015 16:03:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Feldman: The Black Pacific 207 I locate the black Pacific in Peru and (tentatively) other areas along Latin America's Andean Pacific coast (e.g., Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia) where the history of slavery, and even the persistence of people and cultural expressions of African descent, is unknown to many outsiders.4 General studies and maps of African slavery in the Americas often omit these areas, effectively erasing the history of their black populations (see Whitten and Torres 1998:x).5 Within the black Pacific, where ideologies of whitening and mestizaje shade the racial imagination (and where larger indigenous populations typically survive), people of African descent are often socially invisible and diasporic identity is sometimes dormant. Because less African cultural heritage has been preserved continuously in the black Pacific (or at least so it appears), the cultures of the black Atlantic seem very "African" to some residents of the black Pacific. Even the ubiquitous metaphors of water and ships linked to Gilroy's black Atlantic fail to encompass adequately the experience of the black Pacific, where enslaved Africans were forced to continue parts of their voyage by land, leaving the Atlantic Ocean behind. In this essay, Iwill navigate the periphery of Gilroy's model by explor ing how the Afro-Peruvian music revival (1950s-'70s) constructed the black Atlantic as a surrogate for "Africa" and a center for the redistribution of "African" culture. A central element of Gilroy's model of the black Atlantic is its rejection of classic diasporic center (homeland) and periphery (those longing to return) structures in favor of a de-centered geography of post national, multidirectional cultural flow (see also Appadurai 1996; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Clifford 1994; Hall 1990; Hannerz 1992; Safran 1991; T?l?lyan 1996). As Iwill demonstrate, the Afro-Peruvian revival presented an alternate diasporic center-periphery model from the vantage point of the black Pacific, illustrating Ulf Hannerz' observation that "as the world turns, today's periphery may be tomorrow's center" (1992:266). Confronted with scant documentation or cultural memory of the historical practices of enslaved Africans in Peru, Afro-Peruvian revival artists relied in part upon transplanted versions of Afro-Cuban or Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions to imaginatively recreate the forgotten music and dances of their ancestors and reproduce their past, symbolically relocating the "African" homeland (center) to the black Atlantic (periphery). Thus, while Gilroy (1993) and others before him (Mintz and Price [1976] 1992) argue that African diasporic culture was born in slavery and its aftermath, what was inspiring to the lead ers of the Afro-Peruvian revival about certain black Atlantic cultures was that they appeared to preserve an African heritage that had not survived in the Peruvian black Pacific. Despite evidence of the constructedness of some purported African "survivals" in the black Atlantic, in the lived discourse of both the black Atlantic and the black Pacific, the belief that these practices are continuous retentions of African heritage is an important way out of the This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Thu, 23 Apr 2015 16:03:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 208 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2005 anxiety of double consciousness.6 As Iwill explain, the leaders of the Afro Peruvian revival appropriated as "African" heritage cultural traditions born, creolized, or syncretized in the black Atlantic. To set the stage, first Iwill provide a brief overview of the black experience in Peru and the conditions that led to the Afro-Peruvian revival. The Afro-Peruvian Revival Like other parts of the black Pacific, Peru?popularly stereotyped as "the land of the Incas"?is not known for its black population, despite its participa tion in the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, Peru was an important South American center of African slavery, supplying slaves to other Pacific Coast countries such as Ecuador and Chile. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, enslaved Af ricans generally continued on to Peru from Cartagena by sea (via Panama) or from Rio de la Plata by land (via Chile) (Bowser 1974:26-51, 54-55; S. de Studer 1958:237). Black slaves tended to work inmulti-ethnic groups on small haciendas and silver mines or (more commonly) in the urban homes of white slave owners, facilitating rapid assimilation into white Peruvian coastal societyAccording to historians, a sizeable minority were not from Africa and had already acquired European languages and customs;7 they were ladinos or criollos who either had lived as slaves in Spain, Portugal, or the Americas or had been born into slavery in those locales (Bowser 1974:4,73; Lockhart 1994:196-97; Luciano and Rodriguez Pastor 1995:273).8 In fact, the rush of Spanish explorers and their African slaves from other parts of Spanish America to Peru in the early sixteenth century was apparently so great that it left some Caribbean islands nearly depopulated (Bowser 1974:5). Despite the importance of Peru's slave markets in the context of the black Pacific, a relatively small number of enslaved Africans (including African bozales, ladinos, and criollos) were brought to Peru over the course of the slave trade.9 However, blacks made up a large portion of Peru's coastal urban population in colonial times, outnumbering whites in 1650. In the last Peru vian census to include racial data (1940), blacks apparently had declined to an estimated .47% of the country's population (29,000 blacks), approximately one-third the numerical size of the black population in 1650 (90,000 blacks) (Glave 1995:15).The so-called "disappearance" of Peru's African-descended population generally is attributed in large part to deaths caused by slavery and military service (Tompkins 1981:374), but itwas also the result of changes in racial self-identification by people of African descent who identified culturally with whites as criollos (Stokes 1987). By the twentieth century, many black Peruvians living in urban coastal cities such as Lima demonstrated little or no sense of belonging to an African diaspora. African-descended musical traditions had similarly disappeared from This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12

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