Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940.

Cornelius, Steven

By Robin D. Moore. (Pitt Latin American Series.) Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. [xii, 320 p. ISBN 0-8229-5645-4. $19.95.]

Cuba from 1920 to 1940 was a nation engaged in considerable social, economic, and political turmoil. Interestingly, this was also a period in which - through a process of vigorous contestation, appropriation, and assimilation across social boundaries - music became a powerful metaphor for an emerging national identity. Musical styles exhibited a vitality that continues even today to influence musical thought throughout much of the Western hemisphere.

This is a field that has been little researched to date. Robin Moore's well-documented publication, a historically informed sociology of Cuban music rather than a discussion of its sonic aspects, begins to bridge that gap. Rather than following a chronological scheme, Moore has divided his book into topical sections. In a sense, what he has provided is a multilayered historical sandwich in which, between chapters of introduction and conclusion, the historical development of a variety of Cuban music genres is outlined and detailed.

The format is appropriate because of the complexity of the task, made all the more difficult since, as Moore notes, in Cuba "little history 'from below' has been written to document the personal experiences of the working classes and other marginal groups" (p. 26). Data gathering, says Moore, was further complicated by the admission of Cuban scholars that some research published since 1959 could be flawed, for "publications deviating in any way from official Communist Party history created the possibility of political complications for the author" (p. 9).

Moore appears to have done a good job of getting around the second issue. His analysis is highly detailed and generally balanced in political stance. As for the first issue, distinguishing voices "from below" is problematic, for while the book focuses on music forms born within and appropriated from the black Cuban lower class, that group had little input into this book. Interviews with elderly musicians, even if they had to he presented anonymously, would have added considerable impact to the author's arguments.

There are other problems as well. Curiously, Moore chooses to make the point in his introduction that "Music and dance have always been among the most democratic of the arts in Cuba, representing forms of expression accessible to minorities that appeal to listeners across class and racial boundaries" (p. 4). Yet most of this book seems to argue just the opposite. When music does cross over the bounds of class and race, as Moore illustrates in finely documented detail within a variety of genres, it inevitably picks up not just new meanings, but new forms of presentation. In other words, music crosses social boundaries only after it has been adapted to fit the value systems of those who choose to use it.

In each of the six central topical chapters, Moore presents the issues at hand in a clear and ultimately predictable form. Each begins with a brief overview, provides a chronologically organized history and analysis, and ends with a formal conclusion. Therefore, while contributing to a greater understanding of the whole, each topic is also relatively self-contained. Although it is not altogether clear why Moore chose to delay for specific chapters discussion of certain broadly relevant theoretical issues - such as the importance of transculturation in the writing of Cuban social scientists (p. 167) - this clumping of theory with topic might be handy for one wishing to extract discrete music topics from the book for use in an advanced undergraduate class or seminar.

Titled "Minstrelsy in Havana," chapter 2 reaches back to the 1860s and outlines the development of Teatro vernaculo. Moore demonstrates how parodic black character types, played by white actors in blackface, developed and began to mediate tensions across race and class.

The following chapter discusses the Afro-Cuban comparsa bands of both nineteenth-century Kings' Day festivities and pre-Lenten carnival celebrations. The analysis focuses on how, despite prejudice against the purest Afro-Cuban cultural forms, comparsa music was appropriated and modified to meet the interests of outsiders. Consequently, instrumental music was purged of its strongest Africanisms while lyrics were modified to reflect white stereotypes of Afro-Cuban culture.

The fourth chapter focuses on the development, commodification, and, by the late 1920s, reification of urban son music as a centerpiece of Cuba's national expression.

Chapter 5 looks at the rise of afrocubanismo, a generally white-middle-class artistic movement that took inspiration from the culture of the black working class.

Finally, chapters 6 and 7 further develop ideas surrounding afrocubanismo and investigate how they are played out in the social spheres of commercial rumba and the musical vanguardia movement.

Moore's analysis of rumba is wide ranging. Of particular interest are his insights into the surprisingly complex task of identifying the genre itself, for as he notes, "Such is the diversity of the repertory referred to as rumba, and the musical influences that have contributed to it, that to speak of particular compositions as authentic and others as unauthentic seems ridiculous" (p. 189).

The discussion of the vanguardistas is less successful, for while debunking the movement - and such representatives as Amadeo Roldan and Alejandro Garcia Caturla - for its artificial reconstruction of black Cuban style and identity, Moore fails to account for the interest these artists continue to hold in wider circles.

In fact, one might argue that Moore's broad analysis of the expanding impact of Afro-Cuban musical and cultural forms - an impact felt not just within Cuban culture but throughout much of the Western world - is perhaps too dour. Certainly it is true that these musics, born from the Afro-Cuban underclass, were appropriated, adulterated, and reshaped to meet the artistic and financial interests of those more powerful. But it is also true that what emerged from that mix were new musical forms of extraordinary vitality and interest for the elite and subordinate alike.

Moreover, today those reshaped forms offer paths by which outsiders can be led back to musical styles that may otherwise have remained unnoticed. This is a point that, in his implicit attempts to stake out a chimeric higher ground, Moore often misses.

STEVEN CORNELIUS Bowling Green State University