Events

Past Event

Preserving the Afro-Andean Culture and the Indigenous Quechua Language through World Music

November 11, 2022
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
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Join us for an afternoon workshop and musical performance by Afro-Andean Funk.

This workshop invites participants to engage with the history and music of Peruvian tradition, and will include conversations about cross-cultural collaborations between musicians and the musicalization of traditional Afro-Andean musical instruments that have survived generations. Singer and producer Araceli Poma will bring instruments to share her Andean-Afro roots with participants.

The Peruvian traditional music workshop is followed by a performance by Afro-Andean Funk, a new band based in New York City and founded by musicians and producers Araceli Poma and Matt Geraghty. The band was just nominated for the 2022 Latin Grammy for their debut album, The Sacred Leaf. This debut brings the legacy of a long history of Afro-Andean music and traditions mixed with broad modern musical styles and the language and cultural reclamation of Quechua, the most spoken Indigenous language in Latin America, with about 8-10 million speakers in the diaspora. The album comments on the current struggle of women and Indigenous people for social justice and human rights, including those forced to sterilize in Peru’s Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian regime.

Facilitated and organized by Dr. Renzo Aroni, a Quechua Scholar and Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher in the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Co-sponsors:
Institute of Latin American Studies
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Department of Music

For more information, visit the event page.