IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH february 2017 | Page 118

included, for the first time in our history and in accord to the state of the art of musicology, the Afro-Argentines of the colonial trunk. To that end, as a researcher devoted for more than twenty years to study it, the Director of the National Institute of Musicology Carlos Vega( my workplace) asked me to do the necessary paperwork. I delivered it with zealous hurry. However, I found nothing of it, but an elementary history reduced in time and space to almost an anecdote from the Rosas’ epoch( 1829- 52). That history was partly under foreignization, as the result of an ideological script at least from a century ago. As there is neither research nor dissemination without ideology or social commitment, I will begin to explain myself from the word game in the title. Musicologist and journalist Pablo Kohan published an article about the exhibition entitled " All music in one place. From Ricky Maravilla to Carlos Guastavino, the sound expressions that have had and have a place in our country "( La Nación, April 28th, 2012). He also published it in the Yahoo group of the Argentine Association of Musicology. Some forum visitors commented and one of them made an observation about the unfortunate elitist treatment by the musicologist advisors, who“ descended from Olympus to daily practice and contributed with their research for providing concepts and expressing ideas that have a resounding realization.” I had read that comment, but the word Olympus, so beloved in its distant Greek resonance, struck me from a nearer and unpleasant place, since it matters me as an Argentine citizen and researcher. The Olympus was a clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires, during the last civic-military dictatorship, for people with adverse ideologies and for making them disappear. The military officer in charge was Commander Alfredo Astiz, a. k. a. The Blond Angel of Death. Why this association? Because at that very moment I was transcribing the testimony of a survivor. She and her daughter were held there and the latter is still missing because of such extreme experience. Justifiably, when I refer to the history of the genocide against Africans among surviving compatriots of the slave trade— since our country was art and part of it for three and a half centuries—, they place themselves as the first desaparecidos: disappeared from Africa, disappeared from history, disappeared from censuses, disappeared from museums, disappeared from the national memory, disappeared from the social imaginary, disappeared from textbooks... We already know, we live in a country of absences and all absence is intentional. My disappointment with the exclusion of Afro-Argentine music has nothing to do with my academic zeal, but with the commitment assumed to its representatives, who not only pre-exist the nation-state, since their presence is as old as the Hispanic ´ s going back to the 16th century, but it has been olympically ignored in the stagnant academic narrative— including musicology— that I will treat below in general. Disobeying the rules of the scientific method for producing avant-garde knowledge, the black question is dispatched with superficial and brief a priori assertions since the times of musicologist Carlos Vega until today. The instant and careless results derived not only from desktop hermeneutics, and biased or uncritical readings of dried sources, but above all from the speculation about how the events should have occurred, instead of from the ethnography and the exhaustive paperwork that corroborate how they actually occurred. Unlike other American countries where
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