CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic and Critical Perspectives
An anthology of scholarly articles, critical essays, interviews and
creative writings on reggaeton
Edited by Raquel Z. Rivera and Deborah Pacini Hernández
Deadline for abstracts: March 31, 2006
Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2006
While reggaeton has received a great deal of attention in the media, it
has yet to receive scholarly attention commensurate with its musical
and cultural importance. The first volume of its kind to address this
rich and relatively unexplored field of inquiry from a diverse set of
disciplinary and methodological approaches, it will begin posing
questions, proposing hypotheses, and identifying further areas of
research. The editors are seeking theoretical and/or ethnographically
grounded essays from the humanities, social sciences, and
interdisciplinary studies examining reggaeton from the perspectives of
production, dissemination, consumption and performance, which can
include considerations of history, musical aesthetics, discourse and
images, dance, technology, as well as other related issues such as
transnational migration and media globalization. We are particularly
interested in ethnographic studies that engage with reggaeton as lived
practices. In-depth interviews, oral histories, relevant visual art
(photographs, graffiti or otherwise), poetry, and fiction will also be
considered.
We invite submissions that address (but need not be limited to) the
following issues:
.What are the musical aesthetics that mark reggaeton as a genre? How
have those changed over time?
.What is the relationship between reggaeton and other popular
Latino/Latin American-identified music genres? What has been the
history of the integration of "popular" and "traditional" Latino/Latin
American musical styles into reggaeton?
.What is the nature of its links to its principal Spanish-language
precursors: Puerto Rican underground and Panamanian reggae en español?
How different was the Panamanian reggae tradition from what eventually
became known as reggaeton in Puerto Rico?
.How is reggaeton connected to U.S. hip hop and Jamaican dancehall
reggae? What is the relationship between hip hop and reggaeton in Latin
America, elsewhere in the Americas and beyond? Is reggaeton better
understood as a subgenre of hip hop and/or dancehall, or a genre unto
itself?
.What do reggaeton aesthetics, images, dance styles, patterns of
consumption, etc. tell us about race and ethnic relations, identity
formation, gender constructions and gender relations, nationalism and
transnationalism?
.What are the intersections between dance, gender and sexuality in
reggaeton?
.What is the history of women's participation in reggaeton?
.What can previous studies of reggae, hip hop and other forms of
Latino/Latin American popular music contribute to reggaeton? Should
reggaeton have a space within the emerging field of Hip Hop Studies,
and if so, what should it be? What do previous studies of salsa and
other Latino/Latin American popular music contribute to our
understanding of reggaeton? How, for example, do the arguments
regarding reggaeton's origins parallel arguments over salsa's origins
and issues of cultural ownership?
.How does reggaeton articulate with the global consumption of
Latino/Latin American music?
.How does reggaeton fit into a music industry segmented by (perceived)
racial/ethnic markets? What is reggaeton's connection to the
development of new media and technologies?
NOTES FOR PROSPECTIVE AUTHORS:
.Abstracts should be no less than 150 words and no more than 250 words.
A short biography should be submitted along with the abstract. The
editors will select abstracts based on originality and quality of
proposed content, clarity of presentation, and contribution to the
volume as a whole, and invite authors to submit their full-length
essays by June 15. The editors will use the abstracts in the process of
soliciting a publisher, but acceptance of abstracts does not constitute
acceptance of the final paper.
.Scholarly articles should be no less than 5000 words, and should not
exceed 8000 words. The length of other submissions may vary. We
encourage authors to make the writing style of their submissions
accessible to as wide a readership as possible, without sacrificing
scholarly depth.
.The editors' goal is to publish this volume in as timely a manner as
possible. Since obtaining permission to quote popular song lyrics or
to reproduce images of musicians or CDs is time-consuming and, often,
cost-prohibitive, we want to avoid last-minute problems that can hold
up production, so authors must have obtained permission to quote song
lyrics and/or reproduce images at the time of submission. Securing
permissions, and if necessary, making payment, is entirely the author's
responsibility. If obtaining permission proves to be difficult or
impossible, we encourage authors to paraphrase lyrics (and/or limit
their quotes only to short phrases, i.e. 1 line) rather than quote
songs directly; or to cite lyrics that have been previously published.
THE EDITORS
Raquel Z. Rivera is the author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone
and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Tufts
University.
Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and
Director of the Latino Studies Program at Tufts University, is
co-editor of Rockin' Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in
Latin/o America and author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican
Popular Music.
