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The Flamenco Effect: an overview
The Flamenco Effect: Authenticity, Community and Tradition in the Golden Age is a monograph authored by Ian Biddle. The book, submitted to Routledge in February 2026, investigates the cultural and medial construction of flamenco, primarily centering its analysis on the Golden Age. It moves from the internal logic of the music to its complex intersection…
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Flamenco, gender, and the ideology of the body
The study of gender within flamenco has traditionally been overshadowed by a focus on ethnic and class-based marginality. However, the transition of the artform into industrial modernity revealed a rigid patriarchal structure that deeply mediated how male and female bodies were permitted to inhabit the professional space. By examining the Golden Age through the structural…
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What is “agrandamiento”, and why is it important to the study of flamenco?
In the study of flamenco’s transition from an oral tradition to a global commodity, few concepts are as critical—yet as frequently overlooked—as agrandamiento. Literally meaning “enlargement” or “magnification,” agrandamiento refers to the aesthetic and structural expansion of flamenco as it moved from the private, communal sphere into the public, professionalised space of the café cantante.…
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What are the primary sources for a history of flamenco’s Golden Age?
Constructing a history of flamenco’s Golden Age requires navigating a complex landscape of traditional archives and ephemeral traces. Because this period coincides with the rise of industrial modernity, the primary sources are not limited to written texts but extend into the realms of the visual and the acoustic. These sources reveal the “Flamenco Effect” in…
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Flamenco as vernacular agency
In the critical discourse of the Global North, flamenco is often framed through the “Flamenco Effect”—a tendency to view the art form either as a romantic relic of the past or as a passive subject of sociological study. However, a close reading of the transition into modernity reveals a different narrative: one of vernacular agency.…
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Flamenco as an affective archive
The history of flamenco is often presented as a tension between the ephemeral “lived” experience and the static, mechanical records of the past. However, a deeper reading of the art form’s transition into modernity suggests that flamenco does not simply exist in the archive; it functions as an affective archive in its own right. This…
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Flamenco and technology in the Golden Age: media, power, and the machine
The “Golden Age” of flamenco (la edad de oro) is often romanticised as a period of pure, unmediated expression. However, a media-archaeological perspective reveals that this era was defined by a profound encounter between traditional practices and the vanguard technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from being a passive subject of modernisation, flamenco…
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Flamenco and its dangers
To say I am in love with flamenco would be a significant understatement. My obsession began in the 1990s as a sudden, powerful fascination from which I have never quite recovered. However, I must also recognise a specific and complex danger within this passion: the risk that such love devolves into a fixation, a fetish,…
The Flamenco Effect 