Dafni Tragaki

Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest - Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities Dafni Tragaki

Brief Description: "The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly "unites European people" through music. It is a spectacle and performative event, one that allegorically represents the idea of "Europe." In "Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest," contributors interpret the ESC as a musical "mediascape" and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, essayists discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of 'assimilation' or 'integration,' and defining the celebrated notion of the 'European citizen' in a global contextBiographical Note: Dafni Tragaki is the author of Rebetiko Worlds: Ethnomusicology and Ethnography in the City (2007). She is currently editing a book on popular music in Greece. Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.; The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly unites European people through music. It is a spectacle and performative event, one that allegorically represents the idea of Europe. In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical mediascape and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, essayists discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of 'assimilation' or 'integration, ' and defining the celebrated notion of the 'European citizen' in a global context. Table of Contents: Foreword: War without Tears: European Broadcasting and Competition / Franco Fabbri -- Introduction / Dafni Tragaki -- 1. Tempus Edax Rerum: Time and the Making of the Eurovision Song / Philip V. Bohlman -- 2. Eurovision Everywhere: A Kaleidoscopic Vision of the Grand Prix / Andrea F. Bohlman, Ioannis Polychronakis -- 3. The Nordic Brotherhoods: Eurovision as a Platform for Partnership and Competition / Annemette Kirkegaard -- 4. The Big Match: Literature, Cinema, and the Sanremo Festival Deception / Goffredo Plastino -- 5. Performing Affiliation: On Topos in the Swedish Preliminaries / Karin Strand -- 6. Delimiting the Eurobody: Historicity, Politicization, Queerness / Apostolos Lampropoulos -- 7. The Oriental Body on the European Stage: Producing Turkish Cultural Identity on the Margins of Europe / Thomas Solomon -- 8. Invincible Heroes: The Musical Construction of National and European Identities in Swedish Eurovision Song Contest Entries / Alf BjOrnberg -- 9. And After Love... Eurovision, Portuguese Popular Culture, and the Carnation Revolution / Luisa Pinto Teixeira, Martin Stokes -- 10. The Monsters' Dream: Fantasies of the Empire Within / Dafni Tragaki -- 11. The Rise and Fall of the Singing Tiger: Ireland and Eurovision / Tony Langlois -- 12. Doing the European Two-Step / Andrea F. Bohlman, Alexander Rehding -- Index -- About the Contributors. Publisher Marketing: The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly unites European people through music. It is a spectacle: a performative event that allegorically represents the idea of Europe. Since its beginning in the Cold War era, the contest has functioned as a symbolic realm for the performance of European selves and the negotiation of European identities. Through the ESC, Europe is experienced, felt, and imagined in singing and dancing as the interplay of tropes of being local and/or European is enacted. In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical mediascape and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, contributors discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of assimilation or integration, and defining the celebrated notion of the European citizen in a global context. Scholars in the volume also explore the ways otherness and difference are produced, spectacularized, challenged, or even neglected in the televised musical realities of the ESC. For the contributing authors, song serves as a site for constituting Europe and the nation, on- and offstage. History and politics, as well as the constant production of European subjectivities, are sounded in song. The Eurovision song is a shifting realm where old and new states imagine their pasts, question their presents, and envision ideal futures in the New Europe. Essays in Empire of Song adopt theoretical and epistemological orientations in their exploration of popular music within ethnomusicology and critical musicology, questioning the idea of Europe and the nation through and in music, at a time when the European self appears more fragmented, if not entirely shattered. Bringing together ethnomusicology, music studies, history, social anthropology, feminist theory, linguistics, media ethnography, postcolonial theory, comparative literature, and philosophy, Empire of Song will interest students and scholars in a vast array of disciplines."