Description:

Join Pedro Varguillas, LACS cluster graduate affiliate and Spanish and Portuguese graduate student, for a research workshop, “Changa Tuki: Sounding Bodies and the Politics of Echo”.

This paper explores the Venezuelan barrio based and produced Electronic Dance Music genre “Changa Tuki” during the rising years of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution. The paper's approach to sound theory and links with affect theory in order to show how political gestuality emerges as the enactment of cultural performance. By proposing the broad questions of “how does a body sound?” and “what a body does when it is resounding?”. The paper explores the constitution of revolutionary politics among Changa Tuki dancers and producers.

Pedro Varguillas. PhD Candidate. Spanish and Portuguese Department at Northwestern University. His dissertation project “La república del beta: Political Gestuality, Affect and Ideology in Venezuelan Literature, Music and Dance (1929-2006) traces the emergence of a political gestuality in Venezuela through literature, dance, and music over an extensive period of Venezuelan cultural history, from 1929-2006. In reading a route that connects these different forms of aesthetic production, it will consider singular works and practices that demonstrate the relationships between ideology and affect. In doing so, it explores the ways that bodies act as agents of political potentiality. This work is a theoretical-critical study of the tensions created when ideology cracks, and political gestuality is the name given to those performances that take place during those moments of crisis.