Editor's introduction.

That this issue of BMRJ addresses a single broad subject is the result of happy coincidence: the almost simultaneous receipt of submissions that collectively brought together a number of issues related to the African diaspora in the circum-Carribean. Usually, thematic issues are the result of articles commissioned by an expert in a particular subject area serving as a guest editor. In the present instance, timing was everything.

The diversity of the subjects addressed in the following articles nevertheless reminds us that scholars in black music regularly confront two challenges. First, solutions to particular problems require critical analysis of source materials that in many instances have either been previously ignored or misread. Such work, by implication, confronts a second obstacle. A large amount of, frankly, Eurocentric scholarship must be critiqued rigorously to determine the extent to which it provides useful perspectives concerning the history and current state of the musical cultures' unmistakable African character within a particular region or, instead, whether intentionally or not, it presents a distorted view of those cultures.

The authors represented here have addressed musical cultures that have been sites of much contestation between European and African practices and values. The thread that unites them all is the role of music as a marker of personal and group identity as well as analysis of competing values--some racial, others religious, still others commercial--that have vied for control of musical style and expression.

In his study "The Mulatta, the Bishop, and Dances in the Cathedral: Race, Music, and Power Relations in Seventeenth-Century Puerto Rico," Noel Allende-Goitia, argues that from the outset of their interactions with Europeans, "the ubiquitous presence of people of African descent in music, theatrical performances, civic and religious festivities, and as characters on stage stands in opposition to the discussive erasure found in ecclesiastic and government documents that refer to these cultural practices" (158). Those efforts at erasure by religious leaders in Puerto Rico were directed most obviously at African forms of dance that blacks and mulattos sought to include in formal religious celebrations, most notably the Feast of Corpus Christi. Allende-Goitfa demonstrates that this effort at censorship arose from a need on the part of both Church and civil authorities to control the lives of the enslaved to the greatest possible extent.

The centrality of music in the discussion of individual identity in the Dutch colony of Curacao is addressed by Nanette De Jong in her examination of the ever-evolving self-definition of Afro-Curacoans, which has provided "a frame of reference by which Curacoans ultimately make sense 'of being diaspora'" (177). De Jong demonstrates that from an initially dichotomous vision of society in which one was either Dutch or African (and if African then culturally inferior) that was established before Emancipation in 1864, the sense of cultural identity became far more complex for Afro-Curacoans during the remainder of the nineteenth century as well as in the twentieth. So successful had the Dutch colonials been in suppressing African cultural traditions that after Emancipation blacks had no cultural foundation upon which to define themselves as free people. Forced to seek work elsewhere in the Carribean following the virtual collapse of the economy after the end of slavery, many migrated to Cuba, where they filled this cultural vacuum with Afro-Cuban musical culture. Musical traditions associated with the danzon, son, guaracha, and guajiro were central elements of this cultural assimilation. De Jong argues, "Cuban music allowed Afro-Curacoans to challenge assumptions regarding origins and cultural boundaries, setting in motion a new way to define their own heterogeneous background" (170).

Cuba from the end of the 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century was also the site of a struggle for self-definition between those who regarded the nation as an extension of Spain and, consequently, who regarded African cultural practices as aberrant or declasse, and those who saw it as a place in which European and African cultures blended together in such a way that the Africanity of much artistic expression was unmistakable. As Mario Rey argues in "The Rhythmic Component of Afrocubanismo in the Art Music of Cuba," these opposing aesthetic positions were labeled, respectively, cubanidad and afrocubanismo. He goes on to show how selected composers comprising the Grupo minorista sought to create a culturally inclusive art music by deliberately exploiting conceptions of rhythm and meter of unmistakable African origin in compositions of concert music.

Javier Leon's article, "Mass Culture, Commodification, and the Consolidation of the Afro-Peruvian Festejo," also argues against binary visions of cultural definition and engagement. His context is the vernacular musical culture of Peru, specifically that of its capital, Lima. Conventional wisdom drew boundaries between the music of the Andes--that of the mestizos-and the criollo music of the city and its environs. The former has been held to have been somehow "pure" until it allegedly stagnated, the result of its commodification by the local music industry. Criollo music was presumed to have been a product of commercial enterprise from the beginning. Through a careful analysis of both the history and the evolving style of the Afro-Peruvian genre, the festejo, Leon argues "that musical style is the symbolic battleground within which performers work out their perceived relationships to the music they perform, as well as to the mass-mediated environment in which it is performed" (217).

Reevaluating assumptions about the nature of identity and rigorously examining the cultural forces that have shaped it are the common concerns of the four articles in this issue. Dichotomous views are challenged. So too are commonplace notions that the evolution of one's sense of self and the evolution of musical styles and genres that serve as markers of individual and group identity proceed uniformly in a single direction. On the contrary, as a society evolves, such evolutions often involve a type of circularity as beliefs once rejected are reinterpreted and thus revived.