Given the nature of her subject matter, Heidi Carolyn Feldman easily could have fallen prey to debating the authenticity of different aspects of the Afro-Peruvian revival. Fortunately, she has avoided this pitfall, instead describing the personalities and sources that contributed to the movement in a way that is sensitive to her informants’ interests while being aware of the complexity of the issues involved. She has concentrated on the revival process itself, and the result is an engaging, well-researched, and thoughtful collection of multiple facets of the revival over time that is exemplary in its combination of historical research and ethnography.
While the book follows a roughly chronological format, each chapter is actually focused on an important individual or group that contributed to the movement, combined with a particular theoretical topic Feldman has associated with that individual. She begins with José Durand, a white Peruvian criollo who formed the Pancho Fierro Company in the 1950s. Durand’s recreation of a presumably disappearing tradition, el son de los diablos, gives Feldman the opportunity to discuss nostalgia criolla, a romantic vision of the past that claims criollos idyllically combined aspects of African and European histories to create a well-integrated Peruvian urban culture. This nostalgia would later be countered by the Africanist-oriented ideas of the formidable brother-sister team, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz. In her chapter on Victoria Santa Cruz, Feldman focuses on Victoria’s concept of “ancestral memory,” the idea that people embody their ancestors’ knowledge. By searching inside herself, Victoria believed that she, like all those of African descent, could access an African understanding of rhythm, allowing her to recreate extinct Afro-Peruvian dances like the landó and the zamacueca. Nicomedes, who concentrated on texts as his source of information, became the poetic voice of the Peruvian variant of negritud, a literary movement that looked to produce works that sought out the unity and beauty in all Black cultures as a form of combating racial stereotypes. He composed verses dealing with his African heritage while accompanied by Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Cuban percussion instruments as well as ornate guitar styling. He also theorized about the African origins of Peru’s música criolla, his theories being partially based on his travels to Cuba, Brazil, and Senegal. These theories were controversial and initially discredited him in the eyes of some scholars. Victoria’s and Nicomedes’ work, however, set the stage for the folklore groups that followed, such as Perú Negro.
In her chapter on this folkloric dance troupe, Feldman borrows a term from Katherine Hagedorn, “folkloricization,” to describe the commercial, public staging of the Afro-Peruvian repertoire. The birth of Perú Negro coincided with the Peruvian government’s establishing a policy that promoted local cultural expressions. With its combination of principal members hailing from Pacific Coast families and support from criollo intellectuals, the group garnered much government support, and audiences took them as representative of authentic Afro-Peruvian folklore, despite the group’s open adoption of Afro-Cuban instruments like the bongó and diasporic representations of orisha worship. Innovative at the time, the group’s success in the 1970s standardized the Afro-Peruvian repertoire so much that the group became essentially limited to repeating their past performances.
Perú Negro’s success prompted scholars to search for the roots of Afro-Peruvian culture, leading them to the rural district of Chincha. Feldman uses Chincha as a site to discuss the effects of cultural tourism from a modern/post-modern hybrid perspective. Chincha acts both as home for Afro-Peruvian culture and as tourist destination for those in search of “authentic” Afro-Peruvian culture on display. Residents of Chincha maintain traditions like Black Christmas but also market participation in this tradition to urban Peruvians, who end up dancing in the very celebration they have come to observe.
In her final chapter, Feldman looks outside Peru’s border to discuss the marketing of Afro-Peruvian music as world music in the 1990s. She contrasts the success of the Susana Baca-David Byrne collaboration with efforts by U.S. Peruvian immigrant communities to express their cultural identity. The same factors Feldman earlier described as taking part in the revival now come into play on the global stage: Baca is marketed as exotic and as part of the African diaspora to foreign audiences, yet her style deviates too much from the standard aesthetic practice to be considered Afro-Peruvian by many Peruvians. In contrast, artists such as Eva Ayllón, who are accepted in this vein, have failed to find widespread success on the world music stage -- their style contains many references that non-Peruvians find difficult to interpret.
Throughout the text, one of Feldman’s important contributions is her idea of the “Black Pacific,” a construct that makes use of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” as a foil to help interpret aesthetic choices made during the revival. Feldman argues that, lacking the wealth of contemporary resources available in other countries like Brazil and Cuba, revivalists in Peru looked to these countries as depositories of authentically African culture to aid in the reconstruction of their own traditions. This perspective ignores the cultural transformations that resulted from the Middle Passage and years of enslavement in favor of a cultural uniformity across the Black Atlantic. For scholars working with African-derived cultures along the Pacific Coast of the Americas, Feldman’s idea articulates well what we can observe elsewhere in the region. Indeed, a similar move, i.e., attention to the historical glosses made to access additional cultural resources, should prove useful to anyone studying the dynamics of cultural revival.
I also appreciated Feldman’s inclusion of personal vignettes she calls “travel diaries.” These descriptions of her experiences range from her visit to an archive in Indiana, to her meetings with Victoria Santa Cruz and watching Perú Negro performances in Lima, to attending festejo contests in California. The diaries serve to keep a personal voice present throughout the text, giving her space to report tangible reactions to the multiple situations she finds herself in. The variety of locations point to the extent to which Afro-Peruvian music has been globalized, and this excellent monograph provides the scholar with an engaging guide to the process.
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[Review length: 1002 words • Review posted on October 24, 2007]