The 11 essays compiled in this volume present the reader with different scenes of a music genre that has become fully engaged with the global marketplace. Based on extensive fieldwork on multiple sites, they challenge us to recognize cumbia as a transnational and global musical phenomenon rather than a genre in a strict sense. One of the coeditors, Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste, thus contends that “cumbia offers a vehicle of study unlike any other, providing an enormous opportunity to explore the arbitrariness of our ways of conceiving of the idea of nation, above all, in terms of rhythm and difference” (p. 248). Music is still central to what culture sounds like, but as music increasingly links the global and the local and vice versa, questions emerge regarding what this new music expresses and represents. Indeed, DJ Shaggy's dancehall version of Colombian accordionist Alberto Pacheco's classic “Cumbia Cienaguera,” the mascot song for...

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