As part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series, Charles Hirschkind presents: Flamenco, History, and the Visions of Andalucismo.
This talk explores the importance of Flamenco within Andalucismo, a movement founded on the principle that contemporary Andalusia is historically continuous with al-Andalus (medieval Islamic Iberia), and that the challenges faced by Andalusians today require a recognition of that historical identity. In Flamenco, proponents of this movement found a musical form imbued with the experience of the Moors, forced into exile from their Iberian home in the 17th century, a music therefore with both Arabic and Spanish roots, connecting one side of the Mediterranean to the other through the historical channel of al-Andalus. Seeking to reclaim a history of cross-Mediterranean kinship that had been erased, first by the Spanish Inquisition, and then by a nationalist historiography, the Andalucistas came to see this musical form as a receptacle of buried memory, one capable of transforming the felt relationship between contemporary Andalusians and their distant (Muslim) kin, and hence the meaningful connections by which the past articulated with the present. In their writings, the pioneering figures of this movement, including Gil Benumeya and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, returned again and again to this music, tracing out each line and curve of its emotional geometry, as if the Mediterranean universe they were assembling demanded such a musical infrastructure. These lines and curves invariably led to the south and east, to the Arabs, Jews, and Gypsies whose historical experience on Iberian soil resonated in the cry of the Flamenco singer and the strum of the guitar.