Music and Post-Communist Subjectivities in Cuba
Rubén López Cano
Introduction
Fundamental to any study of juvenile cultural
practices is how they influence young people’s subjectivity, especially in the
process of becoming citizens. Music is, naturally, an important factor in
determining how youngsters position themselves regarding the national projects
and hegemonic discourses of those governing them. Two
key functions of music in the construction of subjectivity are, on the one
hand, representing subjects, fictional characters, roles, and social agents—on
occasion making visible subjects ignored in other types of discourse, and on
the other, configuring points of view, opinions, and positions that orient the
way young people see themselves and the world around them.
Throughout the revolutionary process in
Cuba, music has been instrumental in shaping citizens’ subjectivities as
described above. In this essay I will summarily review the ways in which the
primary hegemonic subject of the Cuban Revolution has been articulated and
disarticulated in popular music over the last fifty years. This official
subjectivity, historically embodied chiefly in youth, has given way to the
diverse juvenile subjectivities expressed in different musical genres that
proliferate among young Cubans today.
López-Cano, Rubén. 2014. "Music and Post-Communist Subjectivities in Cuba". En Pablo Vila (ed.). Music andYouth Culture in Latin America. Identity Construction Processes from New York to Buenos Aires. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 132-155.
