Songs of cooing and decolonial studies: the naturalization of dominant epistemes or how to hegemonize from the subtlety of song.

Abstract

In our America, music was mixed with everything that the process of colonization meant, articulating diverse sonorities of the different human contingents that populated these lands; and, although the force of the conquerors managed to establish a social and cultural hegemony, nevertheless, the subalternized groups managed to incorporate their cultural capital to leave evidence of a process that although asymmetrical, was not aseptic or immune to the dynamics of cultural exchanges. I intend to show this evidence in the lullaby songs, which express visions of the configuration of three cultures and two worlds: the black, Indian and Spanish cultures, and the Eurocentric and peripheral worlds. The cooing songs refer to the subject of putting children to sleep, which is why they are a privileged medium for the introjection of messages and representations that will later define their social identity, and since each society has a particular representation of what it is to be a man or a woman and the place they should occupy, it is here where the cooing songs are of great importance for decolonial studies: From the messages expressed repeatedly in lullabies and songs, a representation of the type of person one is and the place he or she should occupy in the social classification of work is installed. From this recognition, a "type" of episteme will give order and meaning to all their actions. For this reason I present a review of cooing songs in Venezuela and other Latin American countries, unraveling the meanings expressed to reveal how coloniality operates from the world of tradition, musical memories, and the intimacy of the mother/child encounter in songs with which hundreds of generations have grown and dreamed.