Colombia has the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world, but Afro-Colombians have long remained at the nation's margins. Their recent irruption into the political, social, and cultural spheres is tied to appeals to cultural difference, dramatized by the traditional music of Colombia's majority-black Southern Pacific region, often called currulao. Yet that music remains largely unknown and unstudied despite its complexity, aesthetic appeal, and social importance. Rites, Rights & Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific is the first book-length academic study of currulao, inquiring into the numerous ways it has been used: to praise the saints, to grapple with modernization, to dramatize black politics, to perform the nation, to generate economic development and to provide social amelioration in a context of war. Author Michael Birenbaum Quintero draws on both archival and ethnographic research to trace these and other understandings of how currulao has been understood, illuminating a history of struggles over the meanings of currulao that are also struggles over the meanings of blackness in Colombia. Moving from the eighteenth century to the present, Rites, Rights & Rhythms asks how musical meaning is made, maintained, and sometimes abandoned across historical contexts as varied as colonial slavery, twentieth-century national populism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. What emerges is both a rich portrait of one of the hemisphere's most important and understudied black cultures and a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao. This wonderful ethnography is poignantly place-specific, meticulously aware of history, and convincingly post-structuralist as it reveals formations of blackness in never-ending processes of change, renovation, and reinvention within specific power configurations. --Jean Muteba Rahier, author of Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival " Rites, Rights, and Rhythms is a landmark study in ethnomusicology. It combines sensitive, profound ethnography with a depth of historical insight that is a model for scholars working in any area of the discipline. At the same time, it offers a perspective on the shifting philosophical and material investments in race over time in Colombia that scholars of music and modernity will need to grapple with." --Gabriel Solis, Professor of Music, African American Studies, and Anthropology, University of Illinois Michael Birenbaum Quintero received his Master's and Doctoral degrees in Ethnomusicology at New York University. His research focuses on the music of the black inhabitants of Colombia's Pacific coast region, cultural politics, violence and trauma, black cosmopolitanism, and vernacular uses of technology. He is Associate Professor of Music, Latin American Studies, and African American Studies at Boston University.