ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. In keeping with the book's overall engagement with performativity, each chapter might be understood as a soundscape narrated by its author a portrayal of performance and performance context in a particular moment and place. The book contents are organized in three parts that demonstrate important dimensions of how the ethnography of performance, as paradigm and analytical approach, has evolved in work of contemporary music scholars. It focuses on Robin Moore considers how changing manner in which Euro-descendant Cuban authors depicted Afro-Cuban slaves and free blacks in Cuban teatro bufo, or blackface comic theater, mirrored shifting nineteenth-century socio-political contexts and racial ideologies. Then it also takes the reader to Puerto Rican communities of Hawai'i, where author Ted Solis documents how modifications to the stylistic attributes of local Jibaro repertory track concomitant social changes and elucidate an evolving self-awareness in which Jibaro, Puerto Rican, and Latino subjectivities are at play.
