Music, Nation, and Nationalism

Catalog description

This course explores the relation between music and nationhood, as a historically particular form of collective identity, and a dominant political category in late modern societies. Students will work with key texts in the study of nationhood and nationalism, applying them to musical case studies from different world regions. Touching upon art and popular music, these cases will explore the use of nationalist rhetoric to draw citizens into state projects; the appropriation of minority expressions in defining a national self; efforts by postcolonial societies to forge national sentiment from the fragments left by decolonization; and the nation's fate after globalization.