An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.
Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.
This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.
The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.
Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.
The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.
Emiliano Scaricaciottoli is a writer and professor of literary theory at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of the Arts. Coordinator of GIIHMA and SPERAC.
Contact: Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)/Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), Fragata Sarmiento 16, CABA, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Nelson Varas-Díaz is a professor of social-community psychology at Florida International University’s Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies. He is the author of the book Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (Intellect, 2021) and co-editor of the books Heavy Metal and the Communal Experience (Lexington Books, 2016), Heavy Metal Music in Argentina: In Black We Are Seen (Intellect, 2020) and Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South (Lexington Books, 2020). He is also the director of the documentary films Songs of Injustice: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America (2018) and Acts of Resistance: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America (2021).
Contact: Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, SIPA 330, Miami, FL 33199, USA.
Daniel Nevárez Araújo holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
