"Record it, and let it be known"

Popular music from Brazil and the Caribbean belongs to those cultural practices that are considered, both inside and outside of their countries of origin, to bear the indelible marks of ethnicity. On the basis of a corpus made up of over one thousand songs recorded between 1920 and 1960 in Brazil, Cuba, Martinique, and Trinidad and Tobago, "Record it, and let it be known" offers an exemplary textual analysis of the ways in which these countries' main musical genres staged the encounters of the identity categories of ethnicity and gender in song lyrics during the decades preceding the emergence of more ideologically conscious musical currents. Special attention is paid to the following topics: the relations between ethnicity and national identity; the presence of Africa and slavery; the presentation of the gendered and ethnically marked body; and, finally, the description of cultural blackness.

Christopher F. Laferl is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Salzburg.