Rodrigo Chocano (Vienna): “Afro-Diasporic sensibilities, transoceanic dialogues, and fusion music in the Black Pacific: A Peruvian experience” | Transoceanic Exchanges

Tuesday, 13 January 2026, 2pm-4pm CET
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, room HZ 8

Co-organised by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Prof. Dr. Barbara Alge, funded by ZIAF.

The lecture series is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.

Rodrigo Chocano (University of Vienna, Austria)

This presentation explores how contemporary Peruvian musicians reimagined Afro-Peruvian music by styling aesthetic connections with Africa and its diaspora, in dialogue with their race and class positionalities, conditions of existence, and life trajectories. Given Perú’s location along the Pacific Ocean, its Afro-diasporic music imaginaries built upon trans-oceanic exchanges between the “Black Atlantic” and the “Black Pacific” taking place across artistic, industrial, intellectual, and migratory arenas. Starting in the 1950s, such exchanges nurtured new sensibilities towards Afro-Peruvian musicalities which challenged dominant colonialist narratives that centered slavery as the defining cultural event for Afro-Peruvian populations. Peruvian musicians explored new ways to represent Afro-Peruvian music based on those new sensibilities, often emerging from the dialogue between local musical practices, Afro-diasporic popular music, and the composers’ racial positionalities and life experiences.

This presentation focuses on two Peruvian musicians. It analyzes the case of the virtuoso white, upper-class musician Miki Gonzáles, who reimagined rural Afro-Peruvian music in tandem with rock, Congolese soukous, and Jamaican dancehall in the 1990s. Second, it studies the case of the Afro-Peruvian musician and activist Miguel Ballumbrosio, who reimagines his grassroots musical practices, building upon his experience with African and Afro-diasporic music as an international performer and labor migrant in Europe. In both cases, I analyze how their sensibilities towards Afro-Peruvian music 1) build upon their positionalities and life trajectories, and 2) produce distinctive understandings of Afro-Peruvian fusion music.

Bio Note:

Rodrigo Chocano is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft at Universität Wien, where he leads the project “Music that produces racial inequality? The Impact of Racist Ideas on the Conditions of Existence of Afro-diasporic Musicians in Peru (RACISMUS).” He earned a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University and an Anthropology degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He authored two books and several articles in English and Spanish exploring the connections between music, cultural heritage, and race and ethnicity in Latin America and South Asia. He has held postdoctoral appointments at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Prior to his doctoral training, he worked as a cultural heritage office at the UNESCO field office in Lima and the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. His experience in cultural heritage policy, as well as his decade-long engagement with Afro-Peruvian musicians and activists, inform his current research.