This chapter provides an overview of music in Spain during the Age of Enlightenment. It first focuses on several transversal aspects, such as musicians’ professional profiles, networks of circulation and mobility, and the reinterpretation of popular music as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity. It then examines the principal musical genres, along with their most significant works and authors, such as Domenico Scarlatti, José de Nebra, or Luigi Boccherini, among others. On the one hand, sacred music, which held great importance in such a Catholic country, reflected the tension between continuity and aesthetic change. On the other hand, a rich variety of stage genres flourished in the theatrical sphere, including the zarzuela, although a distinct ‘Spanish opera’ never emerged. In these, the dramaturgy inherited from the Golden Age was enriched through the influence of imported European models. Finally, instrumental genres first gained prominence in keyboard repertoire, before expanding into chamber music and orchestral works, as instrumental music became increasingly autonomous in the final third of the century.

This chapter analyses the different contexts, performance techniques, and stylistic elements that characterise the flamenco complex. Moreover, it accounts for the multiple social processes, institutional interventions, and forms of cross-cultural and transnational exchange that have occurred throughout flamenco’s history. It considers identity processes and debates that flamenco has triggered since the mid-nineteenth century, particularly concerning the identity of the Roma/Gitanos, as well as groups that have mobilised flamenco for different political and cultural ends. The chapter also examines the effects of globalisation and particularly the impact that global flows and influences have had on the development of the tradition, and on the rise of contested notions of authenticity in flamenco. The chapter ends with a consideration of more recent processes of the heritagisation and the institutionalisation of flamenco especially against the backdrop of tourism and Andalusian identity formation since the Transition to Democracy in Spain, beginning in 1975.

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

This chapter characterizes the five central themes that emerged from and unite the contributions to this book. It clarifies how the contributors characterized a defining conundrum of Black poetry, traces its intellectual interventions and its communal sensibilites, identifies its innovative origins and emphasis on syncretism, and captures its artistic beauties. And it clarifies how the contributors characterize the growing influence of African American poets in determining the terms of literary value in US literary culture. It verifies the expertise by which these essays validate African American poetry as a distincitve tradition and as an aspect of a US national tradition which it both critiques and enhances.

This chapter identifies and locates the ethos of the Society of Umbra amidst the effervescent countercultural scenes of New York’s Lower East Side and, later, in the Bay Area. It engages with the various ways in which writers, artists, and poets of Umbra created multiethnic and multidisciplinary creative and performative scenes that brought together “schools” including the New York School, the Black Mountain Poets, and the Beat Generation, with African American poets exploring the best poetic and political possibilities the cross-fertilization of the Lower East Side scene allowed. Such a stance later expanded into vibrant collaborations with Chicano/a, Asian American, and Indigenous poets and performers, which helped in the formation of collectives and coalitions that asserted Third World internationalist politics of resistance in the Bay Area. This chapter argues that, as members of the Society of Umbra sought to define and outline the contours of “black” poetic praxes that anticipated the Black Arts Movement, they also cultivated relationships with various creative communities which affirmed the collaborative mindset central to the Umbra ethos.

During the nineteenth century, the image of an ‘authentic Spain’ – detached from European modernity – became consolidated. According to this idea, the ‘Renaissance’ of Spanish music, represented by the emblematic figures of Albéniz, Granados, and Falla, would have occurred as a result of a return to the essence of the country, embodied in popular tradition. The nineteenth century thus appears – on the whole – as a time of chaos and decadence. However, Spain’s nineteenth-century musical culture was not merely another link in a linear historical chain, but rather a moment of profound reconfiguration of the entire musical field. It was during this century that the concepts of music and the Spanish nation acquired the meaning we attribute to them today. The main objective of this chapter is to outline these transformations, avoiding both the pessimism of a supposed musical void and, conversely, the indiscriminate rehabilitation of ‘unjustly forgotten’ musicians. Conceived as an illustrative example, this contribution seeks to shed light – through the intersection of sacred music, Romantic aesthetics, and new philharmonic concert practices – on the relationship that emerged in the new century between historicism and progress, categories that ultimately shaped the culture of classical music in Spain.

How do poets participating in a Black poetry community navigate between collective purpose and creative individuality, with respect to both political and artistic goals? This chapter engages this and related questions, offering an account of Cave Canem as a resource and force within contemporary Black poetry – but not in an institutional history. My focus here is not the foundation that has been an engine of empowerment and an influential player in the world of twenty-first-century American literature, but rather the ongoing, dynamic gathering of writers that describes itself as “a home for Black poetry.” What can we learn by constructing an aesthetic history of this organization? This effort will lay the groundwork for future scholarship that can more thoroughly explore what Cave Canem demonstrates about the power of collective action and mutual support to change culture, as well as the gravitational pull of the culturally familiar.

In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

In order to characterize how African American poets enacted a version of the avant-garde, this chapter connects the formation of Black writers’ collectives in the 1980s and 1990s to the original theories of the avant-garde in which artistic dissent was tied to social withdrawal and political dissent. It identifies how the Dark Room Collective of the 1980s and early 1990s and the Black Took Collective of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century used their bohemian withdrawal to cultivate innovative artistic practices that led, paradoxically, to mainstream success. Since that success defies racial disparagement in ways analogous to how the collective withdrawal did, this chapter posits that "success" as an "avant-garde thing," an ambivalent extension of avant-garde dissent.

The chapter addresses the silent cinema in Spain, the symbiosis between cinema and zarzuela, and the tensions between modernity and the so-called españolada. It analyses Spanish musical cinema, from folkloric musicals to melodramas with songs at the Second Republic. During Francoism, copla and flamenco fueled Spanish cinema, following the consolidation of the American star system. Copla and jazz shared prominence in comedy, while composers adopted the musical paradigms of classic American cinema in dramas and historical films. The chapter explores how these paradigms shifted with the arrival of Neorealism in the 1950s and the ‘New Spanish Cinema’ in the 1960s. It also examines the presence of popular music in commercial films and pop cinema. With the advent of democracy, composers adapted to a censorship-free cinema with multiple facets: popular comedy, cine quinqui (and urban rumba), middlebrow, satire, memory and nostalgia. The chapter addresses the role of music in the internationalisation of Spanish cinema since 1990, the changes brought by postmodern cinema (electronic, minimalist, and atonal music as well as the extensive presence of pre-existing songs) and a significant revival of musicals that continues to this day.

As a result of the 1898 war with the United States, the nineteenth century came to a calamitous close for Spain with the loss of its once-vast global empire. And yet, the final decades of that century and the beginning of the next witnessed a cultural fluorescence in Spanish art, literature, and especially music. This chapter examines the contributions made by leading composers in a wide variety of genres, including virtuosic solo pieces, art song, orchestral and choral works, opera, ballet, zarzuela (operetta), and opera. It places this repertoire in its relevant historical context and helps the reader to comprehend its enduring significance and popularity. These composers and their works sought to redefine Spanish identity in the post-imperial era by drawing on the country’s rich heritage of classical music, going back to the Middle Ages, as well as its conspicuous wealth of regional folklore, especially but not exclusively Andalusian flamenco.