The guitar-based music known as bachata was born in the Dominican Republic in the early 1960s. Brought to the U.S. by Dominican migrants, it has continually developed to reflect the changing tastes of fans and musicians. Bachata became increasingly popular among younger Dominican Americans in the 1990s and 2000s. This generation of artists reshaped the music, blending multiple genres with Spanish and English lyrics to reflect their multicultural reality. In this book, 27 artists share their personal and collective insights into how modern bachata provides an intimate representation of what it means to be Dominican, Latino, multicultural, and bilingual in a transnational setting.

Bachata--a guitar-based romantic music that debuted in Santo Domingo's urban shantytowns in the 1960s--is today one of the hottest Latin genres. Still, fans and musicians have not forgotten the social stigma the genre carried for decades. This book interweaves bachata's history and development with the socio-political context of Dominican identity. The author argues that its early disfavor resulted from the political climate of its origins and ties between class and race, and proposes that its ultimate acceptance as a symbol of Dominican identity arose from its innovations, the growth of the lower class, and a devoted following among Dominican migrants. La bachata--una musica de guitarra que se estreno en los barrios populares de Santo Domingo en los anos 60--hoy, es uno de los generos latinos mas populares. No obstante, sus aficionados y sus exponentes recuerdan el estigma social asociado que conllevo por decadas. Este libro entreteje la historia y el desarrollo de la bachata con el contexto socio-politico de la identidad dominicana. La autora plantea que su desaprobacion temprana resulto del clima politico en que nacio y los vinculos entre raza y clase social. Propone que su aceptacion final como simbolo de identidad dominicana surge de sus innovaciones, el crecimiento de la clase baja y sus seguidores leales entre los migrantes dominicanos.

The merengue is internationally recognized as the Dominican Republic's national dance. It is an integral and unifying element of Dominican identity both within that nation and among emigrants abroad. Although Dominicans often make the claim that merengue has always been in their blood, the dance is relatively young, and its popularity among Dominicans of all social classes and ages is an even more recent occurrence. This book presents three convincing arguments about the merengue's longevity as a unifying symbol of Dominican identity: Dominican identity and the merengue have necessarily been extremely fluid in order to encompass the different cultural and ethnic groups present; historically, the merengue has become a stronger identity symbol when the nation is or is perceived to be threatened from outside; and the white, Catholic, Hispanic Dominican has long been held as the "true" Dominican identity, causing the dance to become progressively "whitened" in terms of performers and style to reflect this notion and gain wider appeal at home and abroad. A map of the Dominican Republic, related photographs of key figures of Dominican history and merengue artists across the decades, and a complete bibliography are included.

In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.

Oye Como Va! provides an incisive historical and contemporary overview of all the major popular musical genres defined as ?Latin.? Pacini Hernandez presents an insightful, coherent, eloquent, and engaging analysis of the hybridity of Latino musical practices, carefully documenting the ?transnational? musical interactions between Latinos in the United States and in their countries of origin. --Amazon.

Defining Bachata -- Music and Dictatorship -- The Birth of Bachata -- Power, Representation, and Identity -- Love, Sex, and Gender -- From the Margins to the Mainstream -- Conclusions.

Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance.

In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution. While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future. When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.

Main Currents in Caribbean Thought probes deeply into the multicultural origins of Caribbean society, defining and tracing the evolution of the distinctive ideology that has arisen from the region’s unique historical mixture of peoples and beliefs. Among the topics that noted scholar Gordon K. Lewis covers are the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beginnings of Caribbean thought, pro- and antislavery ideologies, the growth of Antillean nationalist and anticolonialist thought during the nineteenth century, and the development of the region’s characteristic secret religious cults from imported religions and European thought. Since its original publication in 1983, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought has remained one of the most ambitious works to date by a leader in modern Caribbean scholarship. By looking into the “Caribbean mind,” Lewis shows how European, African, and Asian ideas became creolized and Americanized, creating an entirely new ideology that continues to shape Caribbean thought and society today.