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

Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban Latin and 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 imagination....