Buscando la gozadera / Seeking Pleasure: Timba Culture and Community (Music / Culture)

Buscando la gozadera / Seeking Pleasure traces the rise and global journey of timba music and culture from its beginnings in 1980s Havana to its vibrant presence in 2010s New York City and beyond. Alongside timba, Cuba's most popular social dance—rueda de casino—began to spread internationally in the 1990s as the island reopened to tourism and foreign investment after years of limited global contact. Through bold performances and shared energy, timba and casino brought musicians and dancers together in moments of joyful intensity known as la gozadera. For Cubans, la gozadera was a form of resilience; for outsiders, it became part of the island's long tradition of offering powerful musical experiences to the world. Buscando la gozadera weaves together history, ethnography, and music and dance analysis to explore interactivity and improvisation. It also examines themes of race, gender, and neoliberalism, while probing issues of labor, economy, and virtuosity in the pursuit and circulation of pleasure through popular music and social dance. Sarah Town is a musician and dancer embedded in the Cuban dance communities she researches. She highlights the importance of grassroots networks of musicians and dancers that inhabit the margins, showing how they refuse narratives of scarcity to immerse themselves in communal pleasure. A readers companion is available at weslpress.org/readers-companions/. Read more