Donna A. Buchanan is associate professor of music and anthropology and director of the music ensemble 'Balkanalia' at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in ethnomusicology and the musical cultures of the Balkans, Russia, and Eurasia. Her scholarly interests include the implication of music in cosmology, sound ecologies, and relations of social power and identity.

• Introduction, Donna A. Buchanan; Part I Genres, Histories, and Discourses of Power Performed; Chapter 1 The Teatro Bufo: Cuban Blackface Theater of the Nineteenth Century, Robin Moore; Chapter 2 La Música Nacional: A Metaphor for Contrasting Views of Ecuadorian National Identity, Ketty Wong; Chapter 3 Conserve, Adapt, and Reconverge: Rationalizing a Template in Hawai’i Puerto Rican Musical Performance, Ted Solís; Part II Performing Practice: Style and the Politics of Subjectivity; Chapter 4 Transformation in Communion: Toward an Aesthetic of Improvisation, Tim Brace; Chapter 5 Feminine Flowers among the Thistles: Gendered Boundaries of Performance in Chilean Canto a lo poeta, Emily Pinkerton; Part III Situated Events and Performance Politics: Fiesta, Festival, Stage, and Street; Chapter 6, Michelle Wibbelsman; Chapter 7 Performing Indigeneity: Poetics and Politics of Music Festivals in Highland Bolivia, Thomas Solomon;

’The ethnography of musical performance is so fundamental to contemporary ethnomusicology that it is like the air we breathe. Buchanan’s introduction offers a new window to the genesis of this approach and its broad reach, and then points us to the next steps forward. The articles that follow explore the politics of performance and the power of performativity in relation to history, subjectivity, and specific events through a series of vibrant case studies from across the Americas. Of special interest to Latin Americanists, Americanists, and ethnomusicologists in general, this book both explains and exemplifies why the ethnography of performance has become foundational to the ethnomusicological project.’ Thomas Turino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA