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While well-known to most Peruvians, particularly those who are originally from the coastal region, Afroperuvian music has, until recently, had little dissemination outside of Peru. Heidi Feldman’s Black Rhythms of Peru is the first published monograph-length study on Afroperuvian music in two and a half decades and the first to be widely available outside of Peru. Largely based on field work and archival research conducted between 1998 and 2000 in Peru, the United States and Spain, the book focuses on the Afroperuvian revival movement and its legacy from the 1950s into the turn of the twenty first century. Feldman’s central concern is the role that memory projects have in the construction of a diasporic identity and how these are realized in geographical areas that have generally been omitted from or marginal to discussion of the Black Atlantic (namely, the circum Caribbean, the United States and Brazil). To this end, she posits the notion of the Black Pacific and suggests that descendants of Africans of the Andean Pacific coast have to contend with a number of different challenges: social invisibility and scarce documentation regarding the African experience in the region, lack of a continuously preserved African cultural heritage, and the presence of a large indigenous and mestizo populations that have often been more influential in the development of local race politics and accompanying ideologies of hybridity, assimilation, and national belonging.
