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.
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