Rewriting memory and celebrating Afro-Colombianity estilos capilares, ritualidad y recuerdos en la literatura y la música contemporáneas

Abstract

As rituality and memory are inseparably linked, Afro-Colombianity in contemporary literature and music is celebrated through the performative remembrance of specific historical aspects, re-signifying them. Methodologically, memory and postcolonial studies are combined with research on Afro-Latin American literatures and hair to explore how recent narrative and musical texts negotiate, in continuous intertextual dialogues, the meanings of key identitary elements such as ancestor worship, the remembrance of resistant maroons, and hairstyling. The analysis shows that everyday hairstyling acts are ritualized, with their symbolic meanings redefined within the cultural context of maroonage to positively reinterpret these ceremonial memory acts.