‘Una cosa es el indio y otra cosa es la antropología’: Racial and Aural (Dis)Encounters in Cumbia's Current Circulation

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogotá-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works on the topic, this article traces how this collaboration has circulated on local, national, and transnational scales and theorizes the different discourses of music, race, and nation that emerge from it. Using recent critiques by thinkers of colour to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the idea of theracial assemblageand put it in dialogue with contributions to critical geography by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as well as current music scholarship from Latin America and the global north to build a interdisciplinary study that thinks embodied musickinginplace.