From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Resistance in Colombia Through Fifty Years of Conflict

FAIN: FT-278929-21

Joshua David Katz-Rosene
Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA 17603-2827)

Writing and revising an ethnomusicological study of Colombian folk songs written between the 1960s and the 1990s. 

My project registers the development of Colombian protest song in the 1960s alongside the rise of communist guerrillas and tracks its rebranding as social song in the 1990s, when public support for the rebels waned. I argue that the terminological shift from protest song to social song represents a profound transformation in Colombian society’s views of armed resistance amidst a fifty-year civil conflict. My book is the first to analyze oppositional music in Colombia, a country where guerrilla violence persisted long after it dissipated elsewhere in Latin America. By evaluating the complicated legacies of twentieth-century revolutionary rhetoric and the protest music that propagated it, my project will contribute new perspectives to Latin American cultural and political history. Insomuch as it investigates the changing contexts within which musical resistance was defined in Colombia, it will also inform scholarly inquiry into the contingent nature of resistance.