Una escuela rara: Feminist Methodologies, Innovation, and the Sound of What Is to Come in Diaspora Studies

This essay argues that there has been a subtle revolution in African diaspora studies that is emerging across very recent scholarship. Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013) is part of a larger movement in the field of black diaspora studies, not only toward sound studies but toward feminist studies. Vazquez's work, alongside that of Edwin Hill, Shana Redmond, and Tsitsi Jaji (among others), pushes black cultural studies in new directions via feminist inquiry and methodologies, as well as via the basic inclusion of women as subjects/authors/performers of African diaspora culture. This scholarship is remaking the field as feminist in innovative and surprising ways, challenging scholars and students to ask questions about audience, circulation, authorship, and activism that embrace more capacious definitions of black cultural production and its global significance.