Cuban Music, Global Screen: Hypervisibility, Identity Politics, and Resistance in Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao

Abstract

ABSTRACT Music can serve as an important vehicle for making political statements, cohering community and forming solidarity at the intersections of identity, and exposing structures of inequality linked to (post)colonially informed power hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. However, intensified global flows of images and capital in a time of digital dominance have reconfigured existing notions of musical ‘protest’. Through a systemic functional-multimodal approach to the music video for Cuban American artist Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao, this article argues that the politics of identity in music video are often rather compromised to offer certain kinds of precarious resistance. The tensions between the political and the creative-commercial in Seidy’s interpellation as a foreign-but-familiar, national/diasporic-but-exotic mulata cubana evince the ambivalence of claims to protest when they become hypervisible on a ‘global screen.’ A hypervisible figure must market themselves in certain ways; any kind of political intervention must be carefully balanced and constantly negotiated. Ultimately, this article highlights a new identity politics of hypervisibility that is inextricably tied to music as a form of resistance in an age of streaming and video-sharing.