Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2020

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Women's and Gender Studies

Degree Program

Women's and Gender Studies, MA

Committee Chair

Story, Kalia

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Bertacco, Simona

Committee Member

Bertacco, Simona

Committee Member

McCormick, Michael

Author's Keywords

Music Performance; Afro Latinidad; Argentina; rock and roll; pan African studies

Abstract

I have decided that my academic mission, at this juncture at least, is to find common links between 2 groups of people that have come to know themselves through paralleling but colonially different environments. Perhaps it is wise for me to explore the similarities between Afro Argentine Black Music and African North American Music in closer ethnomusicological detail using feminist praxis—after all both communities are part of the African Diaspora and producing Black music. I do this by reconstructing a very limited genealogy of Black Femme’s and their contribution to their respective musical communities. I draw parallels between the global African Diasporic communities of the Americas to connect, but not conflate, the histories of Black Femme performance in music and their contributions to Black Feminist discourse. I argue that Black joy is a musicological and essential element that is unique to and shared between Afro Argentinian and Black North American underground Rock music, as Black joy is one of the phenomenological elements of identity that our distant communities share alongside our antagonistic existences with our respective colonial powers, protest, and resistance. I anchor my argument in Argentinian Feminist Performance theorist Diane Taylor’s work entitled The Archive and the Repertoire and Black Feminist theorist Daphne Brook’s iv work entitled Afro Sonic Feminist Praxis. Black joy is not only fundamental to the performance of Black music in the African Diaspora, but it is also an analytic tool that is methodologically significant and crucial to understanding these shared global identities. I use Black joy as synonymous with Afro Sonic Noise and explore it alongside traditional musicological elements of underground Rock music such as tone and timbre to create a sonic picture of transnational and feminist Afro Sonic Noise.

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