A COUPLE OF months ago, Colombian pop star Shakira stopped by ABC's The View to promote her new album, Fijación Oral, Vol. 1 (Epic). There was no sit-down interview, just a rendition of her latest single, "La Tortura," on a catwalk stage. Her trademark froggy hiccups were in full effect as she treated the TV crowd to a string of epileptic chest-pumps and accomplished abdomen undulations. Most of the moves were echoes of the ones she shows off in the song's video, in which she slides over kitchen countertops and humps hardwood floors mostly, we are meant to believe, to win back the attention of her unfaithful lover, played by Alejandro Sanz, who belts the song's killer chorus.

There was, however, one thing missing from The View's re-creation. In the middle of the video, Shakira dumps black oil all over her body. Then, in a quick close-up, we watch as she dips her hands into the oil and, almost ritualistically, covers her face with it. The torture of infidelity, it seems, leads to blackface and "blackbody." It's when she's blacked up that Shakira dances the hardest and most physically, popping her chest to the point of snapping. The dancing is clearly lifted from West African dance traditions, yet while making the video, she told the press that it was a style all her own, one she described as "tribal."

Her performance of a self-invented, primitive blackness is all the more noticeable because of the song's Afro-Caribbean reggaeton backing track. Though now known as a Puerto Rican style, reggaeton is actually a Panamanian-Jamaican mix, born of Jamaican laborers brought to work on the Panama Canal. When reggaeton began in Panama, it was an explicitly black, working-class form with Afro-Panamanians like El General leading the way. On Fijación Oral, Shakira includes a more explicitly reggaeton version of "La Tortura," and, as she does her dancing, claims it as her own. She calls it "shaketon," a word that in Mexico is slang for masturbation.

African-derived music has always played a role in Shakira's sound. She is, after all, the product of Baranquilla, a Colombian carnival capital with a rich, postslavery African cultural legacy. While Shakira was never considered a representative of black Colombia, she was considered somewhat legit, a pop artist born of a South American mix of European, African, and, in her case, Lebanese cultures, who offered an alternative to the standard Latin pop female formula. But with 2001's Laundry Service (Sony), it was out with the Spanish and in with the blond hair, out with the extra pounds and in with the Pepsi contract. She wanted to conquer America, she liked to tell magazines, just like the Spaniards did. The move didn't go unnoticed. When I talked to a group of black Colombian girls after Laundry Service was safely at the top of the US charts (it would go on to sell an impressive 3.5 million copies here), they talked about Shakira with sadness, as if something of theirs had been lost in her transformation.

In the July issue of Blender magazine, writer Rob Tannenbaum calls Shakira "the embodiment of globalization, the digital-age demolition of national boundaries." I think he's right, but not exactly in the way he means it. Shakira is the perfect example of what corporate globalization does to cultures around the world: It creates commercially viable products that are based on local traditions and ideas while engineered to erase them. In a way, Shakira can be read as "global" precisely because she is no longer read as Colombian. She demolishes national boundaries because she's got a worldwide contract with Sony, because she's no longer another young singer in a developing country where national boundaries are as real as kidnappings, car bombs, and deportations.

To "embody globalization" in this context is also a euphemism for marketable pan-ethnicity, or, bluntly, of not being black or indio. Shakira would not be accepted as a citizen of the world if she were dark-skinned, just ask any of the Afro-Colombian champeta singers who can't get their CDs heard beyond their fishing villages. Her compatriot Carlos Vives tried to pull the same trick with Colombian vallenato, but the ex-soap star kept the indigenous Colombians he was inspired by in his band and in his videos. Which I suppose makes "La Tortura" a pretty honest video in the end – a how-to guide for the international pop set. Dance like an African but claim the move as your own, then cover yourself with oil to show how easily blackness can come on and off.

The video for "La Tortura" was in high rotation on MTV, Telemundo, and Univision at the same time that the controversy broke over Mexico's issuance of postal stamps featuring black Mexican cartoon character Memin Penguin. While US critics were scolding Mexico for recycling an old image of black stereotype that reeked of our own racist past, they were oblivious to the new image of black stereotype dancing right under their noses. Rack it up to bad timing. Memin was a national icon from a different era, not a global one from "the digital age." He committed a sin that Shakira is too savvy to repeat: His blackness, no matter how caricatured, was never meant to come off.

E-mail Josh Kun at jksfbg@aol.com.