25 - Catalysing Latin American Identities: Alejo Carpentier’s Music Criticism as a Cuban Case Study

Summary

Despite the rich diversity of cultures, language and musical traditions in the Latin American world, the vast lands comprising Central and South America have often been considered a monolithic cultural area when viewed from a European perspective, issues of identity and belonging tending to be assumed or over-simplified. While the Franco-American musicologist Gerard Béhague has suggested that concepts of Latin American identity remain fluid, even negotiable, the Cuban-American scholar Roberto González Echevarría has observed that the fascination for European culture throughout Latin America generated anxiety about the perceived cultural and historical gap between the Old Continent and the New, creating a tension that ‘provoked a pendular movement of attraction and rejection, of servile imitation of Europe and militant mundonovismo’ which has become a feature of the Latin American cultural consciousness since the early twentieth century.