(Re)Claiming Power Through Collaborative Reggaeton Music Video Production in Habana, Cuba

• In Event: Families and Communities: The Role of Liberatory Literacy Practices in (Re)Storying Lives

Abstract

Informed by the study of literacies as social acts (Freire, 1970), as well as research on multimodal literacy practices (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996), and affect (Leander & Bolt, 2013),
this study explores Reggaeton artists’ subversive resistance to strategies of power (Foucault, 1975; de Certeau, 1984) through the composing of digital stories (Reggaeton music videos) as literacy tools for social maneuvering in Habana, Cuba. The study illuminates a complex critique of power through the analyses of multimodal literacy practices as social acts (Freire, 1970), focusing specifically on the operations of creativity in (re)claiming, negotiating, and navigating ideologically and physically oppressive contexts. This study aimed to understand the ways that Cuban Reggaeton artists produced and distributed multimodal texts. It further aimed to understand the role of creativity and the affective significance of producing these texts, within constrained environments.

Pushing the boundaries of literacy scholarship, the dialogical method of video portraiture was used to understand the role of multimodal literacy production and to identify the paradoxes that the artists’ experienced as they shared their stories, leveraged their creativity, and confronted their perceived constraints. Through the employment of the video portraiture method, the researcher focused on the “complexities of participants’ lives by forefronting the perspectives, voices, and experiences of the researcher and the participants, portraitist, and the subject” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 18). Over the course of a year, four artists worked collaboratively with the researcher to co-construct and author their own digital portrait, providing insight into their digital media use and production, and the affective importance of Reggaeton in their lives. Data sources included: Field notes, interview data, visual data (photographs and video footage), and video portraits. Analysis draws upon de Certeau’s (1984) framework to explore the intersections between multimodal production and systems of power.

The findings suggest that the composing and distribution of multimodal texts/music videos are tactics for transcending social and political barriers, playing critical roles in artists’ affective perceptions and experiences in the face of adversity. The collaborative authoring, producing, and promotion of Reggaeton videos offers opportunities for Cuban artists as they develop and employ digital literacies in order to (re)claim power and publish their personal stories through complex underground networks. The production of music videos serves as a transformative and liberating tool for enacting agency by confronting physical, social, economic, and ideological constraints faced within the artists’ communities.

Author

• Eliza Desiree Butler, Miami Dade College