Performing identities. Representations of ethnicity, class, and gender in contemporary popular music in the Americas (Part 2)

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

From Nueva Trova to Reggaeton, from Salsa to Hip-Hop, contemporary popular music often serves as a contested field of social struggle and political dispute through the representation of imagined communities that are constructed using different social categories like ethnicity, class, or gender.
Our panel focusses on how contemporary popular music affects identity construction, and how identity construction influences music. What are the social concerns and political issues addressed in popular music? What are the social categories of identification (race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, location etc.) used in representing questions of social status, relations, and hierarchy. Which musical elements (e.g. lyrics, cultural symbols, instruments, musical patterns etc.) can be interpreted as cultural signifiers related to social identity and identity politics?
Whilst recognizing the complexity of postcolonial societies of the Americas the panel is especially interested in how claims of authenticity, as well as expressions of hybridity and transculturality, are represented in contemporary popular music. Furthermore, as popular music is a cultural expression that easily crosses national boundaries, we would like to also address the way musical production reflects and simultaneously creates transnational cultural flows and ethno- or ideoscapes (Appadurai).

Sub Track

• Mass Media and Popular Culture

Session Organizers

• Christian Büschges, University of Bern

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, University of Bern, Switzerland

Chair

• Christian Büschges, University of Bern

Individual Presentations

• “¿Desde cuándo todo valió madre?”: QBA, Rap, and Outrage in Mexican Media Coverage of a Desaparición - Amanda M Black, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)

• Mexican-American Cultural Signifiers in West Coast Hip-Hop during the 1980s & 1990s - Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, University of Bern, Switzerland

• Negotiating nationalism(s): the construction of “traditional narratives” and their impact on transcultural readings of reggae and hip-hop, 1970 to 1995 - James Barber