From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Politics in Colombia, 1966-2016

<p>Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, this dissertation documents the development of <em>canción protesta </em>(protest song) in Colombia in the 1960s, and tracks its evolution in subsequent decades. At the turn of the 1970s, songwriters affiliated with a grassroots <em>canción protesta </em>movement in Bogotá used music as a vehicle for disseminating leftist political ideology and extolling the revolutionary guerrilla groups that had formed in the Colombian countryside in the preceding years. However, <em>canción protesta </em>was an urban phenomenon that emerged in tandem with other countercultural currents, and their confluence in the late 1960s facilitated the rise of a commercial variant of protest song in the 1970s, the reception of which was politically mixed. By the 1980s, many activist-musicians were breaking away from what they viewed as the crudely propagandist song texts of the prior decade. To make sense of protest song’s shifting guises, I situate them in broader discourses of and about resistance, emphasizing the ways in which the resistant dimensions of oppositional music have been discursively articulated in changing political contexts.</p> <p>During the 1990s, the category of <em>canción social </em>(social song) began to replace the term <em>canción protesta </em>in public discourse. While <em>canción social</em> generally denotes the same music that was formerly labelled as <em>canción protesta</em>, it embraces a wider range of artists and carries different associations. One of the central arguments of the dissertation is that the terminological shift from <em>canción protesta </em>to <em>canción social </em>represents a profound transformation, over the course of five decades of civil conflict, in Colombian society’s relationship with the idea of pursuing political change through armed resistance.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Music

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2017

Author dc:creator

• Katz-Rosene, Joshua

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Manuel

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste
• Jane Sugarman
• Patricia Tovar

• Ethnomusicology
• Latin American Studies
• Political History
• protest music
• resistance
• guerrillas
• violence

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2172

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-3213