Rebecca Bodenheimer

"My dissertation, entitled "Localizing Hybridity: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Cuban Rumba Performance," examines a range of innovations that have emerged in the performance of the Afro-Cuban music and dance genre rumba during the last three decades. Rumba, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century within black and racially mixed communities in western Cuba, is a hybrid musical practice that integrates Central- and West African-derived percussion instruments and rhythmic patterns with European melody and Spanish poetic forms. I am conducting research in two cities, Havana and Matanzas, in order to investigate how musicians from different provinces in Cuba have drawn on specific, locally-defined traditions in their respective innovations.

Rebecca"