“Poesía callejera (Street poetry): Production of black spaces through hip-hop in Venezuela”
Topics: Black Geographies
, Latin America
, Cultural Geography
Keywords: Blackness, space, cultural production, Latin America, black consciousness
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43
Authors:
Nadia Mosquera-Muriel, Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract
This paper explores the creative artistic production of black political activists/rappers of reaching out to black Venezuelans through non-commercial and locally produced hip-hop music in Venezuela’s central coast. I will explore how non-commercial hip-hop songs visibilise connections between Venezuelan blackness and Africa, as well as provide the means to disrupt white supremacy logic within the ideology of mestizaje. I argue that the construction of a black sense of place is part of a broader cultural political project whereby hip-hop is used as a pathway to render visible Venezuela’s central coastal space as Black while also blend rural/urban experiences of blackness that speak to the socio-economic disenfranchisement of Afro-Venezuelans. Drawing on 13 months of fieldwork in Osma and Todasana -two villages located in the coastal region in the north of Venezuela, which were former plantations and whose residents are the descendants of Africans who were subjected to slavery until 1854- this presentation illustrates how black activists and cultural producers from these villages affirm positive blackness and narrate Venezuela’s central coast as ‘black place’ in whilst disrupting forms of white supremacy embedded in the narratives of mestizaje. The ethnographic evidence I present in this paper contributes to the growing field of black geographies by understanding the role of cultural strategies in the construction of a black sense of place amid mestizaje’s racial and ideological formation. This research also contributes to understandings of the African diaspora, which has remained silent regarding Venezuela’s case.
“Poesía callejera (Street poetry): Production of black spaces through hip-hop in Venezuela”
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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