Venezuelan music has remained largely unnoticed in the academic English literature. Boasting a tremendous wealth of traditions, it displays influences from the Spanish, indigenous, and enslaved African communities that populated the territory from the “conquest” on and offers a tremendous diversity of genres and styles that vary by region, occasion, time, and sometimes ethnic influences. This book presents critical discussions of some of these traditions in connection with the issue of identity. The discussions capture country and city life, illustrate foundational myths, bring secular traditions closer to Christianity, explore surviving cultural strategies, et cetera. They also analyze the interface between Venezuelan identity and European classical music. The book displays diversity of perspectives in terms of (a) subject matter, as it includes traditional and concert musics; (b) disciplines on which the inquiries are grounded, as it includes essays by scholars and artists from musicology, performance, composition, history, cultural history, and education; and (c) epistemological approaches, as it includes critical, historical, and ethnographic research.

Reveals the revolutionary power of the Chavista grassroots movement Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chavez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people – especially the Chavista masses – do and think in these times of social emergency. Denying us their stories comes at a high price to people everywhere, because the Chavista bases are the real motors of the Bolivarian revolution. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chavez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives. Comprised of a series of compelling interviews conducted by Cira Pascual Marquina, professor at the Bolivarian University, and contextualized by author Chris Gilbert, the book seeks to open a window on grassroots Chavismo itself in the wake of Chavez’s death. Feminist and housing activists, communards, organic intellectuals, and campesinos from around the country speak up in their own voices, defending the socialist project and pointing to what they see as revolutionary solutions to Venezuela’s current crisis. If the Venezuelan government has shown an impressive capacity to resist imperialism, it is the Chavista grassroots movement, as this book shows, that actually defends socialism as the only coherent project of national liberation.