Merengue is a quintessential Dominican dance music. This work aims to unravel the African and Iberian roots of merengue. It examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures.

Defining Bachata -- Music and Dictatorship -- The Birth of Bachata -- Power, Representation, and Identity -- Love, Sex, and Gender -- From the Margins to the Mainstream -- Conclusions.

In Tigers of a Different Stripe, ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson examines a variety of music genres in the Dominician Republic, and its diasporic communities, to shed light on how gender is performed through music, especially merengue tipico, a traditional, accordion-based genre that has undergone great change since the 1960s. Hutchinson goes beyond looking at just the music itself, to how dancing and listening, as well as viewing and discussing music, all play a part in gender performance and construction. Dominican gender roles are usually defined by a binary understanding of gender that is at its worst sexist and patriarchal, with macho men and subservient women. Hutchinson shows how wrong this is in musical performance, where musicians like Rita Indiana bend both gender and genre. The discussion naturally expands to movement, migration, race, class, and notions of tradition and modernity. In the end, Tigers shows how music can either reinforce entrenched gender roles or help to open up possibilities by imagining new roles and identities for all."

Rondón tells the engaging story of salsa's roots in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, and of its emergence and development in the 1960s as a distinct musical movement in New York. Rondón presents salsa as a truly pan-Caribbean phenomenon, emerging in the migrations and interactions, the celebrations and conflicts that marked the region. Although salsa is rooted in urban culture, Rondón explains, it is also a commercial product produced and shaped by professional musicians, record producers, and the music industry. --from publisher description.

In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a "disobedient listening" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor, aesthetic expression, and pedagogical instrument; to how writer and performer Jessica Hagedorn's collaborative and improvisational authorial voice signals the importance of migration and place; and how Pinoy indie rock scenes challenge the relationship between race and musical genre by tracing the alternative routes that popular music takes. In each instance Filipino musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers work within and against the legacies of the U.S./Philippine imperial encounter, and in so doing, move beyond preoccupations with authenticity and offer new ways to reimagine tropical places.

The classic introduction to the Caribbean's popular music brought up to date.