The Black Pacific and the Pacific’s Black: Contrasting Gilroy’s Theses about Peruvian Black Music

Abstract

This analysis discusses and establishes critical counterpoints on the Afro-Peruvian “rebirth” of the 50s and the circulation of imported aesthetic concepts of Blackness in Latin America, based on theoretical constructs seeking to understand this phenomenon in the light of a postmodern approach on globalization and popular culture. We also offer the alternatives of the notion of Afro-Andean for understanding the historical particularities of the Latin American black subject, in counterpoint to Anglos discourses on the matter, and a case study of black guitar player Félix Casaverde and its notion of Peruvian blackness.