Performing Blackness in a Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity through Music in the Dominican Republic

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ( Dominicanness ) and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of dominicanidad are negotiated and ways in which they align with or diverge from official elite notions of national identity, particularly in relation to blackness. By analyzing the evolution of Afro-Dominican genres of music in the last half of the twentieth century and by studying urban pro-black social movements, I reveal a more complex Dominican identity than has generally been acknowledged. For example, I explore the movement of previously marginalized Afro-Dominican music (e.g., the music of Vudú) from strictly rural and ceremonial settings to more urban locations and even into dance clubs as a form of popular music, in the process changing the practice of defining ethnic and religious identities. Other chapters explore recent urban music influenced by hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall, which has vindicated an emerging--if still somewhat controversial--positive Dominican attitude towards blackness

Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, #BlackLivesMatter in Ferguson)

Power Relations in Black Lives

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin

El videoclip como paradigma de la música contemporánea, de 1970 a 2015

“Video killed the radio star”1. Rezaba el estribillo del tema homónimo del grupo Buggles en 1979. Es evidente que vivimos en una sociedad mediatizada por la imagen. Desde la invención del magnetoscopio y desde que la imagen y la música decidieron unirse, ésta ha cambiado para siempre. Ya nada será igual y hoy en día no se concibe un disco o artista sin su videoclip. El mundo de la música es algo complejo. Desde la antigüedad toda cultura, toda civilización ha venido acompañada de una manifestación musical, se trata de una parte de la cultura de cada pueblo. Su evolución está relacionada con la parte creativa de los artistas, que van evolucionando, con el desarrollo de las civilizaciones desde el punto de vista cultural, económico, estético, artístico, sociológico, e incluso es importante la apertura de cada cultura hacia las demás, la evolución, la mezcla de culturas y músicas. Por lo que la música, desde sus inicios ha evolucionado adaptándose y acompañando a todo tipo de cambios, formando parte de las vidas de muchas personas, acompañando al crecimiento cultural de los pueblos. Pero a medida que la sociedad se hace más compleja, la imagen vale más que mil partituras. La música se adapta a este nuevo mandato y va dejando entrar poco a poco en su feudo a la imagen..

From Storytelling to Intercreativity in the Era of Distributed Authorship

Forms of fiction and literature underwent a process of disembodiment and cross-fertilization during the revolution from the Gutenberg Galaxy (printed paper, mass distribution) to the McLuhan Galaxy (new media, hypertext, cooperative writing). The dimension of literacy has moved from a semiotically- measured geometry to a dislocation and a deconstruction of contents and channels that give expression to new products. The impact of social media on narratology has redefined the meaning of readership and authorship. The author not only loses his/her traditional role, but becomes an icon of himself/ herself, a collective-minded producer that is self-perceived through the extro- flexed eye of the amniotic network in which he/she defines his/her narrative experience. Transmedia culture defines a new cross-networked and amniotic literacy, considering that we are not facing a simple adaptation of different narrative forms from one media to another: different media and languages participate and contribute to the construction of a transmedia environment

Spanish Translations of African-American Neo-Slave Narratives : Linguistic Variation and Ideology

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 30-10-2020La motivación de esta tesis surge de combinar mis dos áreas de investigación académica: la traducción literaria y la literatura estadounidense. Dediqué mi trabajo de fin de máster a una propuesta de traducción para una novela de esclavitud, The Good Lord Bird, de James McBride. Traduje la novela completa al español, que publicó Hoja de Lata en septiembre de 2017 con el título El pájaro carpintero. Esta tesis doctoral continúa con las líneas de investigación que inicié en el máster y se centra en estudiar un corpus formado por doce novelas de esclavitud afroamericanas y sus respectivas versiones españolas, con el propósito de examinar las estrategias traductoras que recrean las obras que dan voz al Otro desposeído, es decir, a los esclavos negros, y reflejan así una identidad racial característica. El objetivo de esta tesis es estudiar cómo se han traducido al castellano las novelas de esclavitud afroamericanas, para lo cual se centra en qué estrategias se utilizan para verter la variación lingüística y el dialecto de los esclavos, el Black English...The motivation for this dissertation stems from the combination of my main areas of academic research: Literary Translation and American Literature. My Master’s dissertation focused on the development of a partial translation proposal for a neo-slave narrative, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, which I wholly translated into Spanish and was published by Hoja de Lata in September 2017 with the title El pájaro carpintero.Continuing with the research lines initiated in my Master’s degree, this PhD dissertation centers on a corpus made up of twelve African-American neo-slave narratives and their corresponding versions into Spanish, with the aim of examining translators’ strategies when re-creating novels that give voice to the dispossessed Other, i.e., black slaves, and portray a characteristic racial identity. Thus, the aim of this PhD dissertation is to study how African-American neo-slave narratives have been translated into Spanish, focusing on the strategies used to render linguistic variation and slaves’ use of Black English...Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu