Afro-latin Soul Music and the Rise of Black Power Cosmopolitanism : Hemispheric Soulscapes? Between Spanish Harlem, Black Rio and Panama

In the 1960s and 1970s, soul music not only gave voice to a new sense of assertiveness among African Americans in the United States but also contributed to the popularization of Black Power across the Americas. Tracing the emergence of Afro-Latin Soul scenes among Puerto Rican youth in New York, the descendants of Caribbean labor migrants in Panama, and Rio de Janeiro´s black community, the book examines how soul as genre, a style, and a discourse became an inter-American lingua franca that provided diasporic youth with a platform to express solidarity with the African American freedom struggle and a source of inspiration in their struggles against the often denied forms of anti-black racism in Latin American contexts.

Drawing on interviews with protagonists of Spanish Harlem´s Latin Boogaloo scene, Panama´s combos nacionales and the Black Rio movement such as Joe Bataan, Benny Bonilla, Carlos Brown, Ernie King, and Dom Filó and activists such as Denise Oliver, Felipe Luciano, Melva Lowe, Alberto Barrow, Gerado Maloney and Carlos Alberto Medeiros, the multi-sited study conceives of these border-crossing dialogues as expressions of Black Power cosmopolitanism that challenged nationalist identity discourses and the related homogenizing notions of latinidad. Bridging African American and Latin American Studies, the book opens new perspectives to scholars of hemispheric black transnationalism, popular music and social movements in the African diaspora.

Matti Steinitz, Bielefeld University, Germany.