Books & Books is proud to present an evening with Eva Silot Bravo, PhD, discussing her new book, Cuban Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (Palgrave MacMillan, $53.99). She will be in conversation with Marysol Quevedo, PhD.
***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Can't make the event? Order your copy online.
About the Book:
Surveying the impact of Cuba's economic crisis after the demise of the eastern socialist block, this book documents a relatively unexplored transnational network of collaborations among Cuban musicians that migrated to many different countries from the 1990s forward. The book's main argument is that in light of the 1990s crisis in Cuba, new transnational and alternative narratives emerged, resulting in creative "in-between" spaces that reflect a post- socialist aesthetic condition. The manuscript also documents important developments in the Cuban jazz and fusion scenes outside the island in the last 20+ years.
About the Author:
Afro-Cuban female author & creative, educator, interdisciplinary scholar & former diplomat and international negotiator in the United Nations, New York. Currently the Ethnic Studies Faculty at Oakland School for the Art in Oakland, CA. A PhD. in Cultural Studies, Spanish and Literatures from the University of Miami since 2016, an M.A. in International Studies from Florida International University and a B.A. in International Relations from Havana, Cuba. She has published 20+ texts, including academic articles, art reviews and interviews on Cuban music, literature, film, and other cultural topics. Her sustained commitment for documenting voices of migrant, Afro-descendent and female creatives led her to create the blog Cubanidadinbetween, and two bilingual podcasts “Miami Alternativo” and “Word Culture.” She produced concerts and collaborated with local cultural institutions in Miami, promoting Cuban music.
About the Moderator:
Marysol Quevedo, a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. in musicology with a minor in ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Her research interests include art music in Cuba before and after the 1959 Revolution and more broadly the relationship between music composition and performance, national identity, and politics in Latin American music scenes. Quevedo’s chapter, “Experimental Music and the Avant-Garde in Post-1959 Cuba: Revolutionary Music for the Revolution,” was published in 2018 in Experimentalism in Practice: Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press). Her article “The Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba and its Role in the Cuban Revolution’s Cultural Project” was published in the journal Cuban Studies in the spring of 2019. She has written several entries for the second edition of the Dictionary of American Music and is a contributor to Oxford Annotated Bibliographies.
In the fall of 2012, Quevedo conducted archival research at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami, thanks to a generous dissertation research fellowship provided by the CHC.
She is also an active member of the Latin American and Caribbean Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. She currently serves as one of the editors of the AMS's online publication Musicology Now.
