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The Ch'ixi Blackness of Nación Rap's Aymara Hip-Hop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2020

KARL SWINEHART
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Abstract

This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 13 , Special Issue 4: Music, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Americas , November 2019 , pp. 461 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Responding to IndiVisible: African-Native Lives in the Americas” at the University of California Davis. Many thanks to Jessica Bisset Perea for encouraging me to develop this paper further. I also thank her and Gabriel Solis for their editorial leadership on this issue and, along with two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Louisville for their feedback, in particular Simona Bertacco, Lisa Björkman, and to the University of Louisville Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society. Finally, I thank Eber Miranda Quispe and David “Tawit” Lipan of Nación Rap for their music and for their openness to discussing it with me.

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