Illuminating exploration of Afro-Latin music’s challenge to Western cultural imperialism

Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban and Latin salsa to disco and rap, is overwhelmingly neo-African. Created in the midst of war and military invasion, and filtered through a Western worldview, these musical forms are completely modern in their sensibilities: they are in fact the very sound of modern life. But the African religious philosophy at their core involved a longing for earlier eras — ones that pre-dated the technological discipline of labor forced on captive populations by capitalism. In this groundbreaking new book, Timothy Brennan shows how the popular music of the Americas — the music of entertainment, nightlife, and leisure — is involved in a devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening. He explores the challenge that Afro-Latin music poses to Western cultural imperialism, and the processes by which it has been absorbed into the imperial impagination.


Praise for Wars of Position:

“Brennan’s vigorously interrogative style dramatizes an unsettling yet productive skepticism, a sobering homeopathic injection into the current euphoria about the possibilities of globalization.” — American Book Review

Timothy Brennan is professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. His books include At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now and, most recently, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of the Left and Right. He writes for a number of journals, including New Left Review and The Nation.