Music, Power, and Politics (PDF)

"Music, Power, and Politics" presents thirteen different cultural perspectives on a single theme: the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from seven countries (England, People's Republic of China, Germany, South Africa, USA, the former Yugoslavia, and Iran) explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The cultural and historical scope of the collection is intentionally broad and includes essays that examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Mao's China, and modern day North Korea; propagandistic popular song in civil war-era USA; hegemonic processes in the folklorization of indigenous dance in Mexico; postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia, Bolivia, and Barbados; punk music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for women in the UK; the subversion of racial stereotypes through Trinidadian music in the USA; music as a tool of popular resistance in modern day Iran; governmental control of music recording and broadcast in pre-unification East Germany; and strategies of surveillance and power relations within audio technologies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Scholars and students of music, politics, and cultural history will enjoy this groundbreaking collection.