Pepa Anastasio, Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Calkins 326A
Cultural Studies
To conduct research on these performers it is necessary to look into their personal archives, which contain professional and personal notes and documents, press clippings, programs, etc... These archives hold informaFon that might seem trivial but that when put together creates a very interesFng story about the significance of popular music, performers and their audiences in the cultural history of Spain and LaFn America. With help from research grants from HCLAS I have been able to conduct visits to different archives in Barcelona, Madrid, Almagro (in Spain), as well as Buenos Aires (in ArgenFna). The pictures in this poster have been collected from these archives. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center in ManhaNan is a fantasFc resource for my project as well. The staff at Hofstra’s Axxin Library are also a great support , and so is the Interlibrary Loan program.
The Produc2ve Pleasures of Popular Culture
The discipline that informs my research is Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary field that is fairly new. Cultural Studies as an academic discipline considers that individuals and socieFes make sense of the world, and create new meanings, through the pracFces of everyday life, which can oGen be used as an instrument to protest and contest imposed meanings. Cultural Studies takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how cultural pracFces are related to relaFons of power, and to quesFons of class, gender, race, naFonality,… My research concentrates on popular music, specifically, the music created and experienced in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The concept popular music is beNer understood in relaFon to what we might call serious music: ABBA is considered popular, while Mozart is considered serious. Popular music is also related to mass media and the ability to record and distribute music to the general audiences. The first academic to pay aNenFon to popular music was the German criFc Theodor Adorno, and he was very criFcal about it. Adorno, who was wriFng in the 1920s, claimed that through the standardizaFon and the mechanical reproducFon of music, people are reduced to “masses” that can be easily dominated and manipulated through the producFon and consumpFon of music as a commodified cultural product. His criFcal view of popular music was prevalent unFl the 1960s, when a group of academics, also influenced by Marxism, elaborated on Adorno’s criFque to suggest that audiences (and they were focusing mostly on working class audiences) were not necessarily passive consumers of the meanings disseminated through the media. They proposed, instead, that audiences could be acFve interpreters and users of popular culture, and as such, were able to contest, negoFate or oppose the hegemonic (dominant) ideologies present in cultural arFfacts. This is, in very broad terms, the approach that I take to study the producFon, disseminaFon and consumpFon, of popular music in 1920s Spain.
The archive
maria.j.anastasio@hofstra.edu
Research and Teaching
“To the extent that music is a way of feeling and expressing .me—and it if involves dancing, the spa.aliza.on of .me—it is also one of the most produc.ve fields for examining the complex dynamics of sociocultural iden..es. Among other ways, we express who we are (including what we have been and will be) by composing, playing, humming, singing and dancing (A. Quintero Rivera, Salsa, sabor y control, 1998) I try to incorporate my research in my classes. This semester, Fall 2013, I am teaching a new class enFrely about popular music in Spanish (SPAN 131 Popular Music in Spanish: Audiences, Industries, Geographies, TR 12:45-‐2:10). In this course we look at popular musical genres such as salsa, hip-‐ hop, reggeaton, flamenco, rumba, etc... to explore how the creaFon, circulaFon and consumpFon of popular music engage with the social and the poliFcal in LaFn America, Spain and LaFno USA. I also like to incorporate the results of my research in courses such as SPAN 113, or SPAN 120 both about Spanish Cultural history. It is important that students learn about different cultural manifestaFons, both “serious” and popular. And it is also relevant that students learn to interpret contemporary mass culture, and its relaFon to power and categories of gender, class, naFonality, sexuality… Before our research becomes a monograph, we disseminate the results of our research at conferences and publicaFons. At conferences we My book project, FrivoliFes: The ProducFve Pleasures of Popular Culture, explores popular music talk to scholars with similar interests and we come up with projects to th genres performed by women at the turn of the 20 Century in Spain (especially, the style known as work together. This is one of the most rewarding parts of research. cuplé, a performa.ve genre considered frivolous and inconsequenFal because it hinged on sexual innuendoes). Selected PublicaFons: “El derecho al goce: género y cuplé en las primeras décadas del siglo My main argument is that musical pracFces as a relevant aspect of culture necessary for XX” in Genre et cabaret : les loisirs nocturnes du corps, edited by Jordi understanding social and cultural history, and parFcularly the social history of Spain in the 20th Luengo López, 2013 century. hNp://www.lecturesdugenre.fr/Lectures_du_genre_11/Contenus.html My approach merges cultural studies with gender and performance studies. Looking at the lives and “Julia Fons’s Scrapbooks of a Chorus Girl: Life-‐wriFng and popular work of the women who sang and performed in the music halls from 1910-‐1930 (and their musical pracFces in early 20th Century Spain” in Feminine Singular: Women Growing up Through Life-‐wri.ng in the Luso-‐Hispanic World, audiences), and at the corpus of musical and cultural commentaries from that period and beyond, edited by Maria Jose Blanco and Claire Williams (Oxford: Peter Lang, my book places the musical pracFces associated with the cuplé in the context of recent criFcism esFmated p ublicaFon d ate 2 014) about the parFcipaFon of women in the shaping of modern Spain. “Pisa con garbo: el performance del cuplé en la modernidad I suggest that the increasing popularizaFon and commercializaFon of music offered women an hispanohablante” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 13 (2009). unprecedented public forum. There are two main claims in this argument. On one hand it Special Issue on Music and Performance Studies edited by Alejandro underscores the acFve parFcipaFon of uneducated, working class girls in the transformaFon of Madrid, University of Illinois at Chicago. hNp://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a61/pisa-‐con-‐garbo-‐el-‐cuple-‐como-‐ society. On another front, I propose that the enactment of frivolity characterisFc of the genre, and performance its place in the context of the business of pleasure (cabarets, café-‐concerts, music halls, etc.), conveys a sort of alternaFve poliFcs, one based on pracFces rather than ideologies. I argue that it is “¿Género ínfimo? El cuplé y la cupleFsta como desaqo', Journal of precisely the supposedly frivolous character of the genre that allowed women to communicate a Iberian and La.n American Studies, 13:2 (2007):193 – 216. radical message that would otherwise have been inadmissible. To use a phrase coined by George Lipsitz that I really like, the stage allowed audiences to “imagine the unthinkable” Organized Sessions (selected) Women in Spanish Cultural Arena 1900-‐1940-‐-‐ AlternaFve Spaces, NeMLA 2013 ConvenFon, Boston, MassachuseNs; March 21-‐24, 2013. Popular Literature in Spain: 1907-‐1939, 37th North Eastern MLA ConvenFon, Philadelphia, March 2-‐5, 2006 right shows a caricature of Julia Fons in 1908 The picture on the her book, “Lo que yo pienso” (What I aGer she published think). SubFtled “Secrets From a Chorus Girl”, the book is a first-‐person arFculate reflecFon on what it means to be a variety star and a woman living in the changing society of 1910s Spain.
Manuscript leNer from Consuelo Portela, La Fornarina, sent on July 1911 to her impresario in Barcelona, correcFng the terms in her contract. I found this leNer doing research in the archive of another arFst, Tórtola Valencia, in the Museo del Teatre in Barcelona. I find that this leNer debunks the myth of the ignorant “cupleFsta” whose careers were in the hands of men. La Fornarina, who died in 1915, shows great professionalism and demonstrates that she was in charge of her career.
Paquita Escribano rehearsing on board the ship Infanta Isabel on route to Buenos Aires, ArgenFna. Since many people had emigrated to LaFn America from Spain, varieté troupes would oGen travel to the main ciFes in México, Cuba, Uruguay, ArgenFna. The cuplé, thus, became the first popular cultural arFfact to iniFate a prolific cultural transatlanFc exchange.