Music and the Other - The Special Issue of Patterns of Prejudice

The Special Issue of Patterns of Prejudice on music and the Other, which I guest-edited, is finally out.

Contents

Music and the Other: an introduction
Anton Shekhovtsov

Demonizing and redeeming the gaucho: social conflict, xenophobia and the invention of Argentine national music
Melanie Plesch

Rhapsody in red: Shostakovich and American wartime perceptions of the Soviet Union
Lawrence P. MacCurtain

Germans, Hungarians and the Zigeunerkapelle: performing national enmity in late nineteenth-century Transylvania
Marian Zăloagă

‘Gypsy music’ as music of the Other in European culture
Anna G. Piotrowska

Music as a weapon of ethnopolitical violence and conflict: processes of ethnic separation during and after the break-up of Yugoslavia
Catherine Baker

‘Onward Blackshirts!’ Music and the British Union of Fascists
Graham Macklin

The soundtrack of neo-fascism: youth and music in the National Front
Ryan Shaffer

Mwenye? Muhindi? Mwafrika? Creative encounters with Afro-Asians in Tanzania, Zambia and Kenya
Aaron Louis Rosenberg

Music and the Other: an introduction

My introduction to the Special Issue of Patterns of Prejudice on music and the Other is now available online:

Music and the Other: an introduction

Excerpt:

In the contemporary world, music has been used for an ever-growing number of purposes, a process that has followed closely the evolution of humankind itself. As apparently the most comprehensive study, at least to date, in evolutionary musicology shows us, music—from the emergence of human civilization—has been an essential component of most social behaviours: hunting, herding, story-telling, playing, washing, eating, praying, meditating, courting, marrying, healing, burying and so on. Music evolved along with humans’ neural and cognitive mechanisms, as well as with the advance of technology. Indeed, the history of humankind can be partially documented through the music it produced over the millennia, and the ways it used music for a myriad of purposes.

It is remarkable, however, how the uses of music persisted throughout human history. For example, the ancient Greeks considered Apollo a god of both medicine and music, the biblical David was said to rid King Saul of the evil spirit by playing on the harp, ‘Florence Nightingale brought music to hospitals during the Crimean War’, and, just a few years ago, Austria became the first country worldwide to officially recognize music therapy as a health profession. Similar persistence can be registered in many other instances.

I have a number of eprints, so the article can be downloaded for free via this link.

Free e-prints of some of my articles

I have a number of free e-prints of my articles published with Routledge. Here they are:

"The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview", Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2008), pp. 491-506. E-print link.

Applying Roger Griffin’s methodological approach to generic fascism, the article analyses individual – socio‐political, cultural and esoteric – themes within Dugin’s doctrine, treating them as elements of a larger integral concept of rebirth that constitutes the core of Neo‐Eurasianism. The article highlights the highly syncretic nature of this ideological core, a direct result of the ‘mazeway resynthesis’ that has conditioned Dugin’s worldview. It argues that this process has been necessitated by his self‐appointed task of envisioning a new stage of history beyond Russia’s present decadent and ‘liminoid’ situation, one that he sees only coming about as the result of a ‘geopolitical revolution’. The variant of Eurasionism that results has the function of a political religion containing a powerful palingenetic thrust towards a new Russia and new West. In conclusion, it is suggested that the new order aspired to by Dugin could only be realised by establishing a totalitarian regime.

CfP: Patterns of Prejudice - Special Double Issue on Music and the Other

A special double issue of Patterns of Prejudice on music and the Other

I will guest edit a special double issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice on the role of music in the demonization of the Other, to be published at the beginning of 2013.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, music has played an increasingly prominent role in constructing national identities and promoting various types of nationalist projects. Some of these projects turned to (largely re-invented) musical folk traditions as evidence of the rootedness and longevity of their nations. Later, music was often employed to show the grandeur of nation-states and empires. With the rise of illiberal nationalisms, many composers and performers contributed to the formation of ‘closed’, exclusivist concepts of national identity.

However, no matter how deeply involved particular composers or musicians might be in promoting illiberal social, cultural or political projects, music cannot, as such, be regarded as nationalist, racist or xenophobic. The racist or nationalist associations of a piece of music might arise from the lyrics that accompany it, but often are constructed from without, from the larger social, historical, political or cultural context. For example, the reasons why ‘Giovinezza’ is banned in Italy or Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is rarely heard in Israel do not have much to do with the music itself, but rather with the memories these works evoke, the historical or cultural baggage they bring with them. The majority of punk fans don’t listen to the songs of Skrewdriver or Macht und Ehre, not because they are ‘bad’ punk rock but because the band members are racist.

This special issue will feature original research articles focusing on historical and contemporary instances of intersection of music and nationalism. We are particularly interested in contributions that address the following issues:

* musical works as lieux de memoires
* appropriation of folk music in nationalist narratives
* music and racial or ethnic conflict
* the role of music in the demonization or stigmatization of ethnic, racial or national communities
* xenophobic tendencies in contemporary musical genres such as Punk, Industrial, Hip-Hop, Neo-Folk, Dark Ambient, Black Metal and others
* the use of music by historical and contemporary far right movements, organizations and parties

Proposals for articles (500 words) addressing these and related issues should be submitted by e-mail before 15 June 2011. All final contributions must be the original work of the author/s; they will be subject to peer review and the editors’ decisions will be final. Please send proposals to Anton Shekhovtsov (anton.shekhovtsov@gmail.com) and Barbara Rosenbaum (b.rosenbaum@dsl.pipex.com).

Modernism and Eugenics

The first volume in the recently established book series "Modernism and..." (edited by Roger Griffin) is out -

Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)



Is the nation an 'imagined community' centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? Modernism and Eugenics examines this question from a bifocal perspective. On the one hand, it looks at technologies through which the individual body was re-defined eugenically by a diverse range of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940; on the other, it illuminates how the national community was represented by eugenic discourses that strove to battle a perceived process of cultural decay and biological degeneration. In the wake of a renewed interest in the history of science and fascism, Modernism and Eugenics treats the history of eugenics not as distorted version of crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide but as an integral part of European modernity, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to renew an idealized national community.