Kirstie Dorr | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)
Papers by Kirstie Dorr
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2012
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2007
... View all notes. Track Three, the Andean Music industry; Conclusion. The listener unfamiliar w... more ... View all notes. Track Three, the Andean Music industry; Conclusion. The listener unfamiliar with the immeasurable variance in Andean sonic and rhythmic configurations might not capture theaesthetic innovation that was clearly legible to Alomía Robles's Peruvian compatriots. ...
Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation
<p>Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and... more <p>Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and racial justice via transnational, indigenous, and women of color feminist perspectives. It also puts the black/white racial binary that has animated the rest of the book into a broader racial perspective. Kirstie A. Dorr introduces a set of case studies that signal some of the thorny polemics that complicate and confound the pursuit of racial justice as a solely nation-based project. This chapter concludes that, in our current political moment, analyses of racial discourse and practice must contend with the ways in which racial formation processes are at once <italic>geo-historically specific</italic>—that is, as temporally emplaced in particular, local, regional, and national contexts—and <italic>geo-historically relational</italic>—that is, as situated within and articulated with other geographies of racial capitalist formation and networks of cultural circulation.</p>
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017
This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the ... more This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Specifically, it integrates the analytics and vocabularies of sound studies, critical race and gender studies, and feminist geography to examine convergences within the cross-generational work of three Black women performers-U.S. artist Katherine Dunham and Afro-Peruvian artists Victoria Santa Cruz and Susana Baca. I argue that despite differences in content and form, and at times in approach or aspiration, their collective work as political activists and cultural producers can be understood as both formed by and formative of performance geographies of feminist diasporicity., I offer a geo-cultural reading of performed texts and pedagogical practices from each artist to examine how the mobilization of spatialized expressive practices such as siting and staging, and spatial imaginaries such as the "Black Pacific," and the "Afro-diasporic" to contest and reimagine the socio-spatial relations that constitute the more intimate scales of the home and the domestic. I conclude that these respatializations of raced and gendered embodiment advance deprovincialized manifestations of the historical continuities, transnational ties, and internationalist impulses that connect otherwise localized and specific stories of diasporic cultural formation in the Black Americas. 1 INTRODUCTION Renowned musician and world music producer David Byrne was first introduced to Black Peruvian sonic traditions in the early 1990s, when an assignment in a New York-based Spanish class required him to translate the lyrics to Afroperuvian artist Susana Baca's "María Landó" (Feldman, 2007, p. 429). After watching a video-recording of Baca interpreting the ballad, Byrne was so captivated that he learned the song so as to perform it on the South American leg of his Rei Momo tour. Prior to crossing paths with Byrne, Baca had cobbled together a professional career through the sale of self-produced albums at soup kitchens, peñas, and other local venues throughout greater Lima. Yet within a year of making Byrne's acquaintance, her rendition of "María Landó" would become a featured track on Afroperuvian Classics:
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2015
This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the ... more This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Specifically, it integrates the analytics and vocabularies of sound studies, critical race and gender studies, and feminist geography to examine convergences within the cross-generational work of three Black women performers–U.S. artist Katherine Dunham and Afro-Peruvian artists Victoria Santa Cruz and Susana Baca. I argue that despite differences in content and form, and at times in approach or aspiration, their collective work as political activists and cultural producers can be understood as both formed by and formative of performance geographies of feminist diasporicity., I offer a geo-cultural reading of performed texts and pedagogical practices from each artist to examine how the mobilization of spa-tialized expressive practices such as siting and staging, and spatial imaginaries such as the " Black Pacific, " and the " Afro-diasporic " to contest and reimagine the socio-spatial relations that constitute the more intimate scales of the home and the domestic. I conclude that these respatializations of raced and gendered embodiment advance deprovincialized manifestations of the historical con-tinuities, transnational ties, and internationalist impulses that connect otherwise localized and specific stories of diasporic cultural formation in the Black Americas.
To date, projects of racial reconciliation that have gained popular currency within the US have o... more To date, projects of racial reconciliation that have gained popular currency within the US have often been articulated via demands for national redress, whether it be through legislative action, economic compensation, or civic inclusion. From the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the implementation of affirmative action policies in the 1970s, to the immigrant rights movements of the 1990s, US communities of color have made strides in gaining greater access to economic opportunity, institutions of higher education, and representation in state and federal agencies. At the same time, the legacies of these critical social movements—specifically, how they have most often been institutionalized and memorialized—present some unique political challenges for the future of anti-racist organizing. With an eye toward the unique conditions that define our political moment-dramatic shifts in the heteropatriarchal organization and function of the US racial state, the expansion of transnational accords and mechanisms of governance, and the unprecedented dominance of neoliberal capitalism-this essay explores how the logics and strategies of past anti-racist knowledge production and struggle must be retooled in order to effectively address extant globalized geographic arrangements of raced and gendered violence, vulnerability, and exploitation. It tackles two of the salient questions animating the dialogue of this forum-"is racial reconciliation a realistic possibility in early twenty-first century America, and how would social conditions have to be reorganized to foster a society in which racial justice could be achieved?"-by pointing to some of the potential pitfalls of positioning the nation-state as the ideal or exclusive scale at which social justice agendas can or should be articulated and activated.
In 2005, the Servicio Postal Mexicano sparked an international controversy with its release of a ... more In 2005, the Servicio Postal Mexicano sparked an international controversy with its release of a postage stamp series commemorating Mexican comic book character Memín Pinguín, a racialized caricature of a boy of African descent. This article examines of the content and tenor of Mexican and US media debates surrounding the character, from its condemnation in Washington as an offensive racial stereotype to its promotion by Mexican government officials as a national ambassador. These and other racial-national discourses that structured the Memín debates relied upon and reinforced a prominent post-NAFTA racial project: the putative "black-brown divide." In the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, this material and imaginary demarcation of blackness and latinidad as discrete racial-regional geographies on both sides of the border has become a crucial terrain of struggle for processes of state formation in the United States and in Mexico. Articulations of "black versus brown" obscure entangled histories of racial-colonial formation and bolster national efforts to manage and/or disavow difference. They also re-entrench state authority and legitimacy at a moment when the private interests of capital are prioritized over and at the expense of the common interests of impoverished national publics.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2012
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2007
... View all notes. Track Three, the Andean Music industry; Conclusion. The listener unfamiliar w... more ... View all notes. Track Three, the Andean Music industry; Conclusion. The listener unfamiliar with the immeasurable variance in Andean sonic and rhythmic configurations might not capture theaesthetic innovation that was clearly legible to Alomía Robles's Peruvian compatriots. ...
Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation
<p>Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and... more <p>Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and racial justice via transnational, indigenous, and women of color feminist perspectives. It also puts the black/white racial binary that has animated the rest of the book into a broader racial perspective. Kirstie A. Dorr introduces a set of case studies that signal some of the thorny polemics that complicate and confound the pursuit of racial justice as a solely nation-based project. This chapter concludes that, in our current political moment, analyses of racial discourse and practice must contend with the ways in which racial formation processes are at once <italic>geo-historically specific</italic>—that is, as temporally emplaced in particular, local, regional, and national contexts—and <italic>geo-historically relational</italic>—that is, as situated within and articulated with other geographies of racial capitalist formation and networks of cultural circulation.</p>
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017
This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the ... more This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Specifically, it integrates the analytics and vocabularies of sound studies, critical race and gender studies, and feminist geography to examine convergences within the cross-generational work of three Black women performers-U.S. artist Katherine Dunham and Afro-Peruvian artists Victoria Santa Cruz and Susana Baca. I argue that despite differences in content and form, and at times in approach or aspiration, their collective work as political activists and cultural producers can be understood as both formed by and formative of performance geographies of feminist diasporicity., I offer a geo-cultural reading of performed texts and pedagogical practices from each artist to examine how the mobilization of spatialized expressive practices such as siting and staging, and spatial imaginaries such as the "Black Pacific," and the "Afro-diasporic" to contest and reimagine the socio-spatial relations that constitute the more intimate scales of the home and the domestic. I conclude that these respatializations of raced and gendered embodiment advance deprovincialized manifestations of the historical continuities, transnational ties, and internationalist impulses that connect otherwise localized and specific stories of diasporic cultural formation in the Black Americas. 1 INTRODUCTION Renowned musician and world music producer David Byrne was first introduced to Black Peruvian sonic traditions in the early 1990s, when an assignment in a New York-based Spanish class required him to translate the lyrics to Afroperuvian artist Susana Baca's "María Landó" (Feldman, 2007, p. 429). After watching a video-recording of Baca interpreting the ballad, Byrne was so captivated that he learned the song so as to perform it on the South American leg of his Rei Momo tour. Prior to crossing paths with Byrne, Baca had cobbled together a professional career through the sale of self-produced albums at soup kitchens, peñas, and other local venues throughout greater Lima. Yet within a year of making Byrne's acquaintance, her rendition of "María Landó" would become a featured track on Afroperuvian Classics:
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2015
This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the ... more This essay charts a vibrant geohistory of Black women's cultural activism in Lima, Perú from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Specifically, it integrates the analytics and vocabularies of sound studies, critical race and gender studies, and feminist geography to examine convergences within the cross-generational work of three Black women performers–U.S. artist Katherine Dunham and Afro-Peruvian artists Victoria Santa Cruz and Susana Baca. I argue that despite differences in content and form, and at times in approach or aspiration, their collective work as political activists and cultural producers can be understood as both formed by and formative of performance geographies of feminist diasporicity., I offer a geo-cultural reading of performed texts and pedagogical practices from each artist to examine how the mobilization of spa-tialized expressive practices such as siting and staging, and spatial imaginaries such as the " Black Pacific, " and the " Afro-diasporic " to contest and reimagine the socio-spatial relations that constitute the more intimate scales of the home and the domestic. I conclude that these respatializations of raced and gendered embodiment advance deprovincialized manifestations of the historical con-tinuities, transnational ties, and internationalist impulses that connect otherwise localized and specific stories of diasporic cultural formation in the Black Americas.
To date, projects of racial reconciliation that have gained popular currency within the US have o... more To date, projects of racial reconciliation that have gained popular currency within the US have often been articulated via demands for national redress, whether it be through legislative action, economic compensation, or civic inclusion. From the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the implementation of affirmative action policies in the 1970s, to the immigrant rights movements of the 1990s, US communities of color have made strides in gaining greater access to economic opportunity, institutions of higher education, and representation in state and federal agencies. At the same time, the legacies of these critical social movements—specifically, how they have most often been institutionalized and memorialized—present some unique political challenges for the future of anti-racist organizing. With an eye toward the unique conditions that define our political moment-dramatic shifts in the heteropatriarchal organization and function of the US racial state, the expansion of transnational accords and mechanisms of governance, and the unprecedented dominance of neoliberal capitalism-this essay explores how the logics and strategies of past anti-racist knowledge production and struggle must be retooled in order to effectively address extant globalized geographic arrangements of raced and gendered violence, vulnerability, and exploitation. It tackles two of the salient questions animating the dialogue of this forum-"is racial reconciliation a realistic possibility in early twenty-first century America, and how would social conditions have to be reorganized to foster a society in which racial justice could be achieved?"-by pointing to some of the potential pitfalls of positioning the nation-state as the ideal or exclusive scale at which social justice agendas can or should be articulated and activated.
In 2005, the Servicio Postal Mexicano sparked an international controversy with its release of a ... more In 2005, the Servicio Postal Mexicano sparked an international controversy with its release of a postage stamp series commemorating Mexican comic book character Memín Pinguín, a racialized caricature of a boy of African descent. This article examines of the content and tenor of Mexican and US media debates surrounding the character, from its condemnation in Washington as an offensive racial stereotype to its promotion by Mexican government officials as a national ambassador. These and other racial-national discourses that structured the Memín debates relied upon and reinforced a prominent post-NAFTA racial project: the putative "black-brown divide." In the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, this material and imaginary demarcation of blackness and latinidad as discrete racial-regional geographies on both sides of the border has become a crucial terrain of struggle for processes of state formation in the United States and in Mexico. Articulations of "black versus brown" obscure entangled histories of racial-colonial formation and bolster national efforts to manage and/or disavow difference. They also re-entrench state authority and legitimacy at a moment when the private interests of capital are prioritized over and at the expense of the common interests of impoverished national publics.