Discourse, Power and Authenticity: The Latin American Cantautor and the Struggle for Truth

Abstract

With the advent of the study of popular music as a social practice has come a renewed understanding of the centrality of the authenticity discourse in the creation of meaning and assigning of value. This meaning, in turn, informs power and its relations, ositioning the discourse centre stage in the struggle to define societal truths.This concept of realness is intrinsic to meaning in popular music as in no other form of popular culture, given the role of artist in performing the aesthetic and ethic relativities and popular music's increasing imbrication in commercial circuits. This thesis examines the role of the Latin American cantautor in this political economy of truth production and use. I position this examination within the framework of hybridity suggested by Nestór García Canclini and Jesús Martín - Barbero, as a concept that both encompasses Latin America's uneven experience of modernity and positions this in the syncretic networks that comprise contemporary globalization trends. Within this framework I employ Michel Foucault's analytic of governmentality to problematize the relationship between subjectivities, truth effects and operations of power. These operations are approached through examining the construction of authenticity discourses, performance and cultural personae by the cantautor in Latin America manifested in different spatio temporal geographies - Chilean Nueva Canción, the Mexican corrido, and Puerto Rican reggaetón. I argue that the cantautor trope articulates a discourse of authenticity to strategies of governmentality to open a discursive space for power. Neither ascribed nor inscribed, authenticity demands discourse and thus raises the fundamental question of who speaks. By exploring a genre of popular music not unique to Latin America, but uniquely representative of its hybrid experience of modernity, who creates meaning and why, can be elaborated. I suggest that the cantautor, as social social activist, maker of music and meaning, provides a key referent for understanding the construction of truth and the relations of power in contemporary Latin America, relations which ultimately, determine how being and reality are shaped.