"Music and Social Conflicts," Zapruder World Volume 7 (2021)

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H-Announce

"Music and Social Conflicts," Zapruder World Volume 7
(2021)
Announcement published by Brian J Griffith on Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Type:
Call for Publications
Date:
June 30, 2021
Subject Fields:
Music and Music History, Asian History / Studies, African History / Studies, Middle East History /
Studies, Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies

Introduction

Music has often been described as a “soundtrack” for social conflicts. However, as recent scholarship
has begun to demonstrate, music’s role within social movements and conflicts runs much deeper than
just sonic representation. Indeed, in both its auditory and lyrical forms, music has played a
multifaceted role within many social movements, conflicts, and uprisings. Music has in fact often
served as the primary social and cultural instrument through which conflicts have emerged and, over
the much longer term, documented as historical experiences.

Aims and Objectives

Our aim with this seventh volume of Zapruder World is to open up a reflection on the relationship
between music and social conflicts. Three main axes shape this analytical approach:

To begin, social conflicts can oftentimes be an incorporated issue within music. By this we intend to
refer to all those acts that offer representations of struggles and conflicts, without being an
expression of a specific political scene (i.e. combat-folk). This calls for a reflection on the
territorialization of individual artists and groups, to explore the nexus between intentionality (in
writing/performing a song that becomes an anthem) and inscription of meaning by those who listen.
This perspective, therefore, invites reflection on the processes of mediation and symbolization, which
offers the possibility for further exploring the primary elements through which such songs became
anthems for social movements and/or conflicts.

The second axis concerns music born out of social conflicts. This perspective addresses music as a
specific cultural product, carrying the “weight” of its origins in a context of social conflict, oftentimes
tied to the class structure from which it emerged. Such an approach assumes, of course, that these
structures are not necessarily clearly articulate, but can oftentimes be unconscious (i.e. working-class
hip hop). This phenomenon has, in some cases, transferred to broader social and cultural movements

Citation: Brian J Griffith. "Music and Social Conflicts," Zapruder World Volume 7 (2021). H-Announce. 05-25-2021.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/7763162/music-and-social-conflicts-zapruder-world-volume-7-2021
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

H-Announce

(as was apparent with punk rock). Such a perspective implies an attention to the modalities of
production, supply and listening, in order to develop an analysis of how social conflict is embedded in
various forms of musical expression.

The third approach is represented by forms of musical expression that were consciously developed
within a militant context and which seek to represent the struggles and other experiences of said
social and political environments (i.e. Italian autonomist rap). Such an approach requires an
examination of both explicit and implicit social and political meanings carried by the music in
question, and their relationships with notions of collective identities. Music can be a useful tool for
understanding conflict, as pointed out by John M. O'Connell (2010); we can understand conflict in
terms of musical structure, practice, and context and can not only represent but also produce
conflict. In this sense we intend to examine music in both ways.

Topics and Themes

A more specific, yet non-exclusive, list of themes we are interested in include the following:

What is the relationship between musicians and the communities they cross? In particular, we
are interested in examining the cases of musicians fleeing repressive governments, civil
conflicts, wars, etc. Moreover, how do musical artists or groups grapple with the contradiction
between any (relatively speaking) commercial successes and the accompanying expansion in
their listening audiences, the vast majority of whom are far less likely to share the loaded
values of the artist’s or group’s "early" recordings?

What can the study of extreme right-wing musicians and musical groups and the communities
orbiting around them tell us about the nature, and values, of contemporary neo-fascist political
cultures?

How can the study of “extreme” (considering both left and right) movements foster a better
comprehension of social and political scenes? We often see a use of the term “scene” which
fails to consider what their boundaries, their specificities, their embeddedness in specific time-
spaces really are. And what can be said of the conflicts inside of these scenes in terms of the
illumination of their boundaries?

What perspectives can the critical study of music and musical cultures offer in comprehending
the overlapping cycles of protest within nested and transcalar geographic realities (eg. the role
played by Chilean street-music within the Italian feminist movement, Non una di meno (Not
One Less)? What degree of contamination can we observe around the second axis, mentioned
above, when the context changes, but the stylemes remain (more or less) the same (eg. the

H-Announce

incorporation of motives of slave-chants in blues and rock)?

What role do alternative marketplaces (i.e. the Do It Yourself ethic within the international
punk rock movement during the 1970s and 80s) play within the successes of musical artists
and groups that identify as “radical”? What are the potential contradictions that revolve
around issues of musical production and distribution?

What is the relationship between music and temporality? To what degree is the process of
recuperating the anthems of the past serving to sustain and give key-words to present protests
and social movements? How are both the past and the future deployed via music towards the
establishment of new forms of unorthodox political theory and praxis? For instance, what are
the possibilities explored, the scenarios opened—but also the risks—of specific treatments of
the past (eg. the use of bluegrass, protest chants, and historical recordings in Panopticon's
Kentucky)? In short, what is the relationship between music and memory?

In what ways has music been used as a tool for empowering destitute communities? On the
other hand, how has music been deployed as the vehicle for disempowering and deflecting
various social and political issues? This approach is particularly interesting when it can be
used to observe conflicts surrounding the work of the same author/s (i.e. the conflicting
opinions on Beyoncé: empowering black women or a “trojan horse” of free-market capitalism?),
which opens up the issue of the positioning of both the artist/s and their audiences.

How have music and lyrics served as “evidence” of past or contemporary social conflicts (such
as in the legal trials in the United States during which hip hop lyrics have been used by the
prosecution as “evidence” for an alleged crime (Kubrin and Nielson, 2014)?

The composite nature of the topics outlined above (something you listen to, but also something you
"read," something that creates a visual experience, and in some cases also something that has a
distinctive materiality) calls for a multi-dimensional approach: Although our primary objective is to
call for papers for this special issue of Zapruder World, we would also welcome audiovisual and
creative materials that could be integrated into and help expand the scope of this collection of case
studies. In addition to scholarly articles, in fact, we invite submissions of non-essay form original
work, such as photo essays, videos, interviews, drawings, comics, songs, hyperlinks to online
resources, multimedia, etc., both accompanying the articles themselves and as standalone
contributions. We encourage authors to think about incorporating multimedia both into their pieces
proposed for Zapruder World and in the sections we have created on the journal's website (e.g.
"Yesterday" and "Today"—see http://www.zapruderworld.org/past-volumes/ for more information).

H-Announce

Volume Deadlines & Schedule

Abstracts in English (250-500 words) shall be sent to submissions@zapruderworld.org by June
30, 2021. All contributors will be informed about the status of their abstract submission by July 15,
2021. Full articles (preferably 6,000-9,000 words) will be expected by October 15, 2021. The
published volume will appear both on Zapruder World's website and as a typesetted, Open Access
PDF by December 31, 2021.

For information on Zapruder World’s peer review process or submission instructions, please see the
following URLs:

Open Peer Review Procedures: http://www.zapruderworld.org/open-peer-review-procedures/

Submissions Instructions: http://www.zapruderworld.org/submissions-instructions/

About Zapruder World

Zapruder World is an international journal for the history of social conflict.

We, the members of Zapruder World's Editorial Board, imagine this project to be a digital journal and
a network of historians and social activists spread through different places, countries and continents,
which will explore the many forms of social conflict and reconsider the notion of social conflict itself.
In so doing, our aim is simultaneously to transform the way we look at history, the way historical
research is organized, and the way historical knowledge is transmitted from one generation to
another.

We understand "social conflicts" in the broadest sense of the word, without spatial or chronological
limits. We target the movements of conflicts—rather than their resolutions—and compare forms of
conflict across time and space in order to connect our knowledge with current transnational cycles of
protests. We consider "social conflict" as a useful interpretative category to address the structural
and mutual relations between classes, genders, cultures and races, as well as technologies, the
formation of identities, and nature. We explore social conflicts by producers as well as consumers,
and stress the agency of historical actors, their memories, discourses, beliefs, and hopes. We seek to
expand and redefine the meaning of insurgent practices beyond the privileged locus of the workplace,
e.g. by looking at public ceremonies, celebrations, street theatre and bodily practices as ways to
express complaints, demands and eventually ignite rebellion. We look at wage and subsistence
workers, men, women and children, slaves and serfs, unemployed and lumpenproletarians and aim to
question the traditional separation between "free" and "unfree" labour.

H-Announce

Social conflict is explored through an interdisciplinary perspective, addressed at any scale and looked
at through constant jeux d'échelles. We use concepts and methodologies derived from history,
ethnography, economy, geography, anthropology, and the humanities at large, to explore the complex
interaction between the "local" and "global." We all practice "global history," broadly defined as
spatially-aware historiography, but intentionally leave its actual definition, contents and methods
open for discussion.

Finally, we seek to integrate empirical research, theoretical insight and methodological self-
reflexivity. In this way we explicitly aim to overcome the tendencies in social conflict studies towards
fragmentation and thematic hyper-specialization that keep these three elements apart. In a word, we
conceive Zapruder World as a laboratory for new forms of historiographical discourse aimed at
matching our thematic focus on the movement of conflict with narrative forms that recapture the
openness of outcomes, and the potentialities of conflict before resolution.

Contact Info:

General Email

info@zapruderworld.org

Editorial Board Members

Stefano Agnoletto: agnoletto@zapruderworld.org
Brian J Griffith: griffith@zapruderworld.org
Beatrice Mazzi: mazzi@zapruderworld.org
Luca Peretti: peretti@zapruderworld.org
Angelica Pesarini: pesarini@zapruderworld.org

Contact Email:
info@zapruderworld.org
URL:
http://www.zapruderworld.org/contacts/

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