This dissertation explores bullerengue music as an oral and aural practice, tradition, and social space through which cantadoras—elderly women singers—construct and preserve knowledge, memory, and affect in the Caribbean region of Montes de Maria in northern Colombia. This study delves into bullerengue as a struggle of forms and cultural practices that cantadoras articulate through musical performance to resist marginalization and embody constructive ways of being in the world. The cantadoras realize a force and artistry directly related to their Maroon history, ontologies based on respect for life and nature, and the affective dimensions of bullerengue performance. My research goal is to assess, question, and impactfully revert the long history of discrimination and oppression in capitalist modernity—by gender, race, and age—while revealing how the hegemonic notions of music, poetry, and politics in Colombia have ostensibly excluded women, Afro-descendants, and therefore, Afro-descendant women. The importance of this dissertation lies in amplifying the cantadoras’ voices in academia through bullerengue as a vehicle for musical, social, and political possibilities to recognize the cantadoras’ ontologies that uphold life and nature over the capitalist extractivist ideology that has brought the global crises of wars.
The research methodology includes music-recording production, participant observation, interviews, and archival research, reflecting on 15 years of collaboration with cantadoras. Chapter One discusses how folkloric constructions of bullerengue have been based on the silencing of cantadoras, given that researchers, as outsiders, could not grasp the influence of Afro-descendant elderly women. To revert the epistemological framework of white men producing ignorance about a tradition led by Afro-descendant women, the archival exploration unsilences women through the sound archive and oral memories of their heiresses. Chapter Two explores bullerengue song as a “technology of sound inscription”(Ochoa Gautier 2014), a women’s archive that shapes culture (Brooks 2021), and a political and epistemic expression within counter-hegemonic sites (Collins 1999; Davis 1999).
I argue that song functions as a (re)sounding historical vehicle for the ancestresses and their heirs to communicate cross-generationally, overcoming the silencing of hegemonic politics and death. Chapter Three ethnographically investigates the lifelong processes of building the bullerengue-voice, drawing from cantadoral testimonies, concepts, and theories in dialogue with academic sources. Chapter Four chronicles the production of the album Ancestras, focusing it as a lens through which to study Petrona Martinez’s bullerengue-voice as an entity that united Afro-diasporic women while blurring symbolic, material, and geopolitical boundaries through song and sound reproduction technologies despite her tragic loss of material voice. I argue that her bullerengue-voice crossed such boundaries thanks to its epistemic aurality—a mutual construction relating voice and worlding—and poetics of collaboration. I also reflect on the album’s cross-cultural collaborations and how I—Petrona’s producer and friend— sought to help her amplify her voice, thought, and oral memory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/2xnq-1j47 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Garcia-Orozco, Manuel |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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