“The Power of Song: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe”
December 4-5, 2020 (Zoom)
Organizer: Levi S. Gibbs (Dartmouth College)
From Asia to Latin America, Europe to Africa, the lives and songs of singers frequently become topics of conversations regarding class, gender, politics, and social change. Controversies from Bob Dylan’s use of electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival to Kanye West’s visit to the White House stem from the power of singers to “give voice to” different groups of people and ways of thinking. What is it about these singers that draws intense public interest and makes them the focal points of controversy? This conference will examine facets of the representative power of famous singers across a diverse array of geographical and historical contexts. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars of anthropology, sociology, literature, music, and performance studies, the conference will produce an edited volume exploring ways in which singers and songs of different genres from around the world have come to represent regions, nations, and historical moments while simultaneously becoming rich sites through which to consider questions of individual and collective identities. Some of the topics to be considered include:
- How do diverse cultural ideas about the social roles of singers and songs influence how their symbolic power is understood in different contexts?
- How does genre (folk, rock, hip hop, opera, pop, etc.) play into a singer’s representative power and how does blending or crossing over between genres bring social conversations connected to distinct genres into contact with one another?
- What layers does singing add in terms of symbolic power when compared to non-singing (e.g., television, film, literary) celebrities?
- How do narratives of singers’ lives and their iconic songs become intertwined, mutually reinforcing one another?
Our edited volume will seek to answer these questions, providing an essential textbook for an interdisciplinary Dartmouth course on “The Cultural Politics of Global Singers” that conference contributors can also offer at their home institutions.
Conference Format:
This two-day online Dartmouth Zoom conference held from December 4-5, 2020, will involve a public keynote address, discussant-moderated group discussions, and a keynote respondent. In advance of the conference, participants will have the opportunity to view prerecorded video presentations by the chapter writers and read their chapter drafts. Then, during the conference’s two afternoons, we will hold sessions where each discussant will synthesize the themes of their section’s chapters and connect those themes to their own work. The chapter writers will have a brief response and then the discussant will open up the floor to discussion. Questions related to these four thematic sections are listed below and can be added to and modified:
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- Becoming Icons
- As singers grow in fame and become symbolic icons, how do they make use of different claims to authenticity and authority?
- How do singers’ different presentations of authenticity and authority connect them to different audiences over the course of their careers?
- How do singers’ presentations of authenticity and authority position them in relation to other competing singers?
- Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Class
- How do the public personae of iconic singers become discursive sites for discussions of race, gender, ethnicity, and class?
- As singers move from traditions with smaller, more localized audiences (e.g., Italian opera, underground hip hop, Cuban music) to broader, more “mainstream” audiences, how do they connect social narratives from the former to the latter? How does the singers’ symbolism change in the process?
- Cultural Symbols and Diasporas
- How do singers become representatives of a particular culture and/or nation?
- What happens when singers engage with diasporic and/or global audiences?
- When singers come to serve as symbols of diasporas, how does their iconic power negotiate gaps between national and diasporic social narratives?
- Lyrics, Lives, and Society as Interweaving Narratives
- How do narratives of singers’ lives, the lyrics of their iconic songs, and broader narratives of social change become intertwined, mutually reinforcing one another?
- How might the lyrics of an iconic song take on new meanings over the course of a singer’s evolving career?
- When different singers perform versions of an iconic song, how do their individual personae and life histories inflect the song’s meaning in different ways?
- Becoming Icons
As we are bringing together an interdisciplinary mix of scholars working on singers from a range of geographical areas, we have invited four discussants—ethnomusicologists, cultural critics, and literary scholars—to respond to and write a short introduction for their respective sections, further tying together the volume as a whole. At the end of the conference, our keynote respondent will synthesize the conference’s sessions and we will finish with a group discussion about the edited volume format.
This project would not be possible without the generous support of the Dean of the Faculty’s Dartmouth Conference Award from the Leslie Conference Gift Fund, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, the Department of Music, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and Associate Dean Dennis Washburn.