Dr Raquel Campos Valverde (Leeds): "Spanish identities in the Latin music explosion"
| Dates: | 17 April 2024 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Raquel Campos Valverde, |
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Part of the research seminar of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS). Co-organised by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. This event will be in Spanish. This event will be face to face, room Samuel Alexander A114. But it can also be followed online: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstract: The Latin Grammys Awards ceremony held in Sevilla in November 2023 represented a milestone for the increasingly shapeshifting idea of Latinidad, and highlighted the strength of the Latin music market in Spain. Recent music industry data shows the exponential growth of the Latin music market in Spain in the past few years (AIE 2022, Promusicae 2022). Since 2020, reggaeton, bachata and merengue have progressively come to dominate the top ten on Spotify Spain. However, this is a relatively recent trend. Why is Latin music so popular in Spain right now? Using data collected among Spanish migrants in the UK in the years leading to this explosion of the Latin market between 2016 and 2019, in this seminar I argue that contemporary Latin music such as reggaeton is the medium and the arena through which Spanish identities are produced, imagined, and contested. Based on cultural studies and critical cultural theory (Hall 1988; 1997, Saha 2018; 2021) I show how conversations and practices around Latin music and media structure Spaniards’ understandings of Spanishness, effectively articulating their lived experiences of hybrid identity and multiple racial consciousness. Moreover, engagement with Latin music in Spain enables a kind of identity work for Spaniards that is inherently intersectional. It is through the constant ‘politics of production’ (Saha 2018) of defining what Latin music is, that Spaniards’ understandings of gender, race, and class are effectively made.
Speaker
Raquel Campos Valverde,
Role: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Organisation: University of Leeds
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A114
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
