Copyright by Kathryn Ann Metz 2010 - The University of Texas at ...

commercial circulation of music. I underscore the dynamic processes that inform their
creation and maintenance as they shift through time. I thus tease out the processual aspects
of identity and address the multi-dimensional contexts that structure it. As Turino notes,
Hybridity
the performing arts are frequently fulcrums of identity, allowing people to
intimately feel themselves part of the community through the realization of
shared cultural knowledge and style and through the very act of participating
together in performance. Music and dance are key to identity formation
because they are often public presentations of the deepest feelings and
qualities that make a group unique (Turino 2008:2).
The two main musical styles I discuss later in the dissertation are pandilla and tecno-
cumbia, both Amazonian in origin and both fundamentally hybrid genres. Many theorizations
on hybridity stem from postcolonial discourse in which scholars such as Homi Bhabha
address the place where cultural differences often collide (Bhabha 1994, García Canclini
1995). Bhabha notes, “Hybridity is the margin where cultural differences come into contact
and conflict…and unsettle all the stable identities that are constructed around oppositions
such as past and present, inside and outside, or inclusion and exclusion” (1994: 20). Bhaba
celebrates the liminal spaces that hybrids create and occupy. In the modern era, nearly all
cultures are hybrid because radically changing forms of communication and transportation
introduce new and different cultural forms that shape local styles, perceptions and
production. García Canclini sees hybrid cultures as symptoms of modernity, understanding
20