“Bailo Desafiando al Hombre”: Isnavi Cardoso Díaz Performing the Politics of Culture in Cuban Columbia

Elizabeth Kimzey Batiuk

In August 2009, while conducting field work in Havana, I witnessed a woman’s gender-bending performance of a style of folkloric dance-music that has typically been performed by men. That night, Isnavi Cardoso Díaz danced columbia as part of a folkloric show staged by the group Oba Ilú at the Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba. A sub-style of the secular rumba genre and an icon of national culture during the socialist era, columbia is performed by a percussion ensemble, solo singer, chorus, and dancers; it is distinguished from other styles of rumba by its rhythms and solo dance. Although several women have been known for dancing columbia, when it is presented as a form of national culture in public folkloric shows in Havana, it has typically been performed only by men. This is despite the fact that all professionally trained folkloric dancers learn the dance and that many Cuban dancers in the diaspora teach columbia to both men and women. Nevertheless, it is still somewhat rare to see women in Cuba perform the solo dance in the context of public folkloric shows (espectáculos folklóricos). So, while Oba Ilú presented a program that conforms with expectations in terms of format and repertoire, Cardoso’s performance departs from the standard style and the way that folklore as national culture represents Cuban identity.

Smetana’s The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and Czech Nationalism: A Historical Reevaluation

Martin Nedbal

On September 4, 1945, a performance of Bedřich Smetana’s opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia inaugurated the first post-WWII season in the building in central Prague that, until a few months earlier, had been commonly referred to as the New German Theater (Neues deutsches Theater). Completed in 1888 in part thanks to donations by Prague’s German elites, the building was appropriated by a group of Czech artists during the uprising of Prague’s Czechs against the Nazi occupation in early May 1945. In commemoration of the uprising, the building was then renamed as the Fifth of May Theater (“Divadlo pátého května”). Amidst mass deportations of German Bohemians out of Czechoslovakia on the principle of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities, the reopening of the former German Theater acquired a symbolic significance. As Kelly St. Pierre has pointed out, post-WWII performances of Smetana’s works operated “as symbols of endurance . . . [and] took place against the violent backdrop of ethnic ‘cleansing’ (‘očista’).” The 1945 Brandenburgers emphasized recent events by using an elevated stage in the shape of a swastika that disintegrated at the end of the opera. The symbolic importance of this particular production was recognized by the political leadership of the newly formed Third Czechoslovak Republic; a few days after the premiere performance, on September 18, President Edvard Beneš attended a repeat performance of The Brandenburgers. An essay in the program booklet for the 1945 performances views the opera as reflecting both recent events and a long-term struggle of the Czechs against foreign, predominantly German, oppression.

“The Revolution Did Not Take Place”: Hidden Transcripts of Cairokee’s Post-Revolution Rock Music

Carolyn Ramzy

In 2016, Egypt’s popular rock band Cairokee renamed the song that propelled them to fame from “Voice of Freedom” to “The Revolution Did Not Take Place.” The new song and its sarcastic video poked fun at the state’s centralized media and military leadership in their efforts to erase the 2011 popular uprising from public memory. Drawing on James Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts and the complicit role of the media in Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, I investigate the band’s political shifts in Egypt’s post-revolutionary music soundscape. Despite aggressive efforts to censor their songs, how does Cairokee embed their political critique of military rule in present day Egypt? And, in their use of ruse, humor, and overt disenchantments with the Egyptian uprising, how do their songs and music videos craft, in Baudrillard’s words, a “third order of reality,” overcoming the classical dichotomy between the “virtual” and the “real” for their audiences offline, only to replicate the same exclusionary class politics that they critiqued in their music?

Selective Tradition and Structure of Feeling in the 2008 Presidential Election: A Genealogy of “Yes We Can Can”

Bruce Curtis

Barack Obama’s 2008 American presidential election and the post-election celebrations were the first to be conducted under the conditions of “web 2.0,” whose rapid spread from the mid-2000s is a historic “cultural break” similar in magnitude and consequence to the earlier generalization of print culture. In Stuart Hall’s terms, such breaks are moments in which the cultural conditions of political hegemony change. They are underpinned by changes in technological forces, in relations of production and communication. They involve novel forms of popular cultural upsurge and novel attempts by political authorities at provocation, education, and recuperation. The Obama campaign, through clever tactics, new communication technology, and cosmopolitan capitalist trends, incorporated a mix of marginal, potentially oppositional, and residual cultural elements in a successful (if unstable and ultimately fleeting) effort to forge political solidarities. Vernacular musical culture played an unusually important role in this process, as the campaign worked to forge a musical-political coalition.

Singing its Way to Prosperity: Shaping the Public Mind through “Healthy Popular Music” in South Korea

Jung Min Mina Lee

In 1960s South Korea, there was a newly strengthened interest in establishing a collective national identity. In fact, achieving a strong, unified national identity and sovereignty had been on the minds of Koreans since the end of the nineteenth century, when various foreign forces—including China, Russia, Japan, America, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—sought to exert influence over the Korean peninsula. The goal of establishing a powerful national identity was only reinforced through the ensuing colonization by Japan (1910–1945) and the US military government’s trusteeship of Korea after the liberation. When the 1960s dawned, however, the prevailing notion of confirming a national identity began to merge with the new rhetoric of “self-reliance,” and public calls to modernize society gained fresh impetus. As will be shown below, such phenomena coincided with significant changes in Korea’s sociopolitical milieu, both domestic and international. Internally, the new regime of Park Chung-Hee, who came into power in 1961, emphasized with an unprecedented urgency the need for Korea’s economic betterment above any other social issues. Externally, he pushed for Korea’s normalization of relations with Japan, participation in the Vietnam War, and increasing economic exchanges with countries other than the US.

About the Authors

Recent Books on Music and Politics

The books listed in this column address music as it relates to political expression or focus to a significant degree on power relationships between individual musicians or musical communities and a governing authority. Readers are welcome to submit additional titles to musicandpolitics@umich.edu for possible inclusion in the next issue.