Book talk: Afro-Latin Soul Music and the Rise of Black Power Cosmopolitanism - ›Hemispheric Soulscapes‹ between Spanish Harlem, Black Rio and Panama (DeGruyter-Brill, 2025)

In his talk, Dr. Matti Steinitz will present his book on the impact of soul music and Black Power in 1960s and 1970s Afro-Latin America. Tracing the emergence of Afro-Latin Soul scenes among Puerto Rican youth in New York, the descendants of Caribbean labor migrants in Panama, and Rio de Janeiro´s black community, the book introduces the notion of "hemispheric soulscapes" to conceptualize how soul as genre, a style, and a discourse became an inter-American lingua franca that connected Afrodescendants across national, cultural, ideological, and linguistic boundaries in their struggles against different forms of white supremacy.

It argues that soul contributed to the popularization of Black Power discourses and aesthetics, providing diasporic youth with a platform to express solidarity with the African American freedom struggle and a source of inspiration as they challenged the often denied forms of anti-black racism in Latin American contexts.

In his book, Steinitz holds that the creative appropriation of political, cultural, and aesthetic manifestations of the US Black movement by Afro-Latin American youth through the collective consumption and translation of soul music constituted a practice of hemispheric black transnationalism which represented a break with homogenizing identity discourses such as mestizaje and democracia racial. Drawing on interviews with protagonists of Spanish Harlem´s Latin Boogaloo scene, Panama´s combos nacionales, and the Black Rio movement, the multi-sited study conceives of these border-crossing dialogues as expressions of Black Power cosmopolitanism that contributed to the emergence of new notions of afrolatinidad and anti-racist movement across the region in the post-Civil Rights era. Bridging African American and Latin American Studies, the book opens new perspectives to scholars of popular music and social movements in the Black Americas.