In the wake of the Buena Vista Social Club, the world has rediscovered the rich musical tradition of Cuba. A unique combination of popular and elite influences, the music of this island nation has fascinated since the golden age of the son -- that New World aural collision of Africa and Europe that made Cuban music the rage in Paris, New York, and Mexico beginning in the 1920s.

Originally published in 1946 and never before available in an English translation, Music in Cuba is not only the best and most extensive study of Cuban musical history, it is a work of literature in its own right....

Originally published in 1946 and never before available in English, Music in Cuba is not only the best and most extensive study of Cuban musical history, it is a work of literature. Drawing on such primary documents as church circulars and musical scores, Carpentier encompasses European-style elite Cuban music as well as the popular rural Spanish folk and urban Afro-Cuban music.

A complex portrait of postdictatorial Chile by one of that country's most incisive cultural critics, this book uses memoirs, photographs, the plastic arts, novels, and other texts--the "residues" of a culture--to analyze the political-cultural Chilean landscape in the wake of Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year military rule. Such residual areas reveal the flaws and lapses in Chile's transition from violent military dictatorship to electoral democracy. Nelly Richard's analysis ranges from an exploration of false memories of the recent past--especially memories of violence--to a discussion of...

Through the dimensions of aesthetics, culture, and politics, Richard (cultural studies, U. Arcis, Santiago, Chile) analyzes certain zones of tension and conflict in Chile resulting from the democratic transition process. He finds the zones to be more or less residual, pointing to unstable formations of symbolic and cultural deposits and sedimentati