Editor's introduction.(Editorial)

That this issue of BMRJ addresses a single broad subject is the result of happy coincidence: the almost simultaneous receipt of submissions that collectively brought together a number of issues related to the African diaspora in the circum-Carribean. Usually, thematic issues are the result of articles commissioned by an expert in a particular subject area serving as a guest editor. In the present instance, timing was everything.

The diversity of the subjects addressed in the following articles nevertheless reminds us that scholars in black music regularly confront two challenges. First, solutions to particular problems require critical analysis of source materials that in many instances have either been previously ignored or misread. Such work, by implication, confronts a second obstacle. A large amount of, frankly, Eurocentric scholarship must be critiqued rigorously to determine the extent to which it provides useful perspectives concerning the history and current state of the musical cultures' unmistakable African character within a particular region or, instead, whether intentionally or not, it presents a distorted view of those cultures.

The authors represented here have addressed musical cultures that have been sites of much contestation between European and African practices and values. The thread that unites them all is the role of music as a marker of personal and group identity as well as analysis of competing values--some racial, others religious, still others commercial--that have vied for control of musical style and expression.

In his study "The Mulatta, the Bishop, and Dances in the Cathedral: Race, Music, and Power Relations in Seventeenth-Century Puerto Rico," Noel Allende-Goitia, argues that from the outset of their interactions with Europeans, "the ubiquitous presence of people of African descent in music, theatrical performances, civic and religious festivities, and as characters on stage stands in opposition to the discussive erasure found in ecclesiastic and government documents that refer to these cultural practices" (158). Those efforts at erasure by religious leaders in Puerto Rico were directed most obviously at African forms of dance that blacks and mulattos sought to include in formal religious celebrations, most notably the Feast of Corpus Christi. Allende-Goitfa demonstrates that this effort at censorship arose from a need on the part of both Church and civil authorities to control the lives of the enslaved to the greatest possible extent.

The centrality of music in the discussion of individual identity in the Dutch colony of Curacao is addressed by Nanette De Jong in her examination of the ever-evolving self-definition of Afro-Curacoans, which has provided "a frame of reference by which Curacoans ultimately make sense 'of being diaspora'" (177). De Jong demonstrates that from an initially dichotomous vision of society in which one was either Dutch or African (and if African then culturally inferior) that was established before Emancipation in 1864, the sense of cultural identity became far more complex for Afro-Curacoans during the remainder of the nineteenth century as well as in the ...