Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Latin America Otherwise) - Tapa blanda

"This is an exciting and an important book, just the kind of contribution that many of us have been eager to find. It weaves politics with popular culture, national borders with rhythm. In short it's up-to-date in terms of intellectual issues, and sensitively down-to-earth in ways that make practical sense."-Doris Sommer, Harvard University "Everynight Life is a major contribution to the ongoing investigation of specific cultural practices heretofore ignored by traditional academic investigation. It will be of specific value to scholars and critics studying issues of performance and performativity as they inform practices of subject-formation in its political, cultural, and sexual dimensions."-Ricardo Ortiz, Dartmouth College

The function of dance in Latin/o American culture is the focus of the essays collected in Everynight Life. The contributors interpret how Latin/o culture expresses itself through dance, approaching the material from the varying perspectives of literary, cultural, dance, performance, queer, and feminist studies. Viewing dance as privileged sites of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latin/o America, Everynight Life translates the motion of bodies into speech, and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar. This anthology looks at many modes of dance-including salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteno-as models for the interplay of cultural memory and regional conflict. Barbara Browning's essay on capoeira, for instance, demonstrates how dance has been used as a literal form of resistance, while Jose Piedra explores the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba. Pieces such as Gustavo Perez Firmat's "I Came, I Saw, I Conga'd" and Jorge Salessi's "Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens" illustrate the lively scope of this volume's subject matter. Contributors. Barbara Browning, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Jane C. Desmond, Mayra Santos Febres, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Josh Kun, Ana M. Lopez, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jose Piedra, Gustavo Perez Firmat, Augusto C. Puleo, David Roman, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval