Drums of Libertad

Juan Sebastian Rojas E. teaches at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota. He is an editor of Musicas y practicas sonoras en el Caribe colombiano and Animal Tales from the Caribbean (IUP, 2017). In Bogota, he directs the bands La Rueda and Visajosa.

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Local Musics and Expressive Culture as Peacebuilding in Rural Afro-Colombia 2. Expressive Culture and Paramilitarism: Velorios and Resilience in Libertad 3. Collective Action: Local Culture and the Reparation of Victims of the Armed Conflict 4. Bullenrap and Tradition: Creativity, Empowerment, and Applied Ethnomusicology 5. Groove and Collective Singing as Communal Musicking: A Bullenrap Performance Analysis 6. Local Peacebuilding, National Peacebuilding: Liberteno Musics and Policy Programs 7. Liberteno Culture: Traces for Resilience and Empathy 8. Local Musics, Marginality, and (Un)Sustainability: (Not so) Concluding Reflections Afterword Appendix Bibliography Index

"This book addresses the crucial subject of the role of music in the processes by which community build, repair, and maintain their social fabric and cultural particularity in the face of trauma, violence, and dissolution. . . . From an ethnographic, real-world base, it builds on existing scholarship to offer its own original insightful reflections on the efficacy of specific elements of cultural policy initiatives, providing a well-thought-out schema of folkloric, bottom-up, topdown, 'developmentalist,' 'culturalist,' and other forms of cultural engagements and specifying the advantages and pitfalls of each."-Michael Birenbaum Quintero, author of Rites, Rights, and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific "The significance of this analysis goes beyond the scope of a case study, as the singularities mentioned above allow the author to inquire about the transformative power of music practices."-Juan Fernando Velasquez Ospina, author of Los ecos de la villa: la musica en los periodicos y revistas de Medellin (1886-1903)