Caribbean palimpsests Music and heritage in Northern Colombia

This book presents a decolonial overview of handed down music practices commonly framed in Northern Colombia as heritage by their makers, and follows the questions of why and how intergenerational acts of musical transmission take place in Northern Colombia.. As heritage, the music practices under scrutiny, such as cumbia, lumbalú, porro, bailes cantaos, vallenato, and champeta, connect past and present in a temporal articulation that assumes cultural transmission has been achieved. However, these practices are affected by gaps, erasures, and mistranslations proper of colonial/modern entanglements. As I demonstrate, palimpsests exemplify how extended processes of musical and cultural transmission are carried out, particularly in postcolonial contexts. The intermittent occurrence of inscriptions in palimpsests, their seeming invisibility coming under question on closer inspection, account for the gaps and erasures that characterise cultural trajectories in such contexts, where collective memory and culturally specific knowledge—musical or otherwise—are primarily passed on and reproduced through embodied performance. This work argues that the reproduction of intergenerationally transmitted musical forms deemed heritage in Northern Colombia follows a palimpsestic and trans-temporal trajectory that is audible at times and silenced at others. Across long periods of time, the irregular and yet rhythmic re-surfacing of these forms of music making constantly rework the mythical, sonic, and musical elements of the colonial Caribbean society inaugurated in the late fifteenth century.