#canon
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The Archival Illusion: How the Golden Age Disciplined Flamenco
The concept of the Edad de oro (Golden Age) remains one of the most resilient structuring fictions in flamenco historiography. Conventional narratives routinely map this epoch onto the final decades of the nineteenth century, demarcating a luminous window in which vocal virtuosity, stylistic variety, and uncorrupted expressive intensity purportedly reached their apex. Yet treating the…
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Beyond the “New”: Re-evaluating the Canon of Contemporary Flamenco Studies
The conceptualisation of a “new” flamencology, once a radical disruption to the mid-twentieth-century orthocanon established by Anselmo González Climent and his contemporaries, has itself matured into an established academic orthodoxy. When modern critical methodologies first challenged essentialist narratives of pure cante jondo, immutable Gitano-Andalusian dichotomies, and romanticised regional isolation, the movement earned its distinction by…
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The intellectual broker: who defines the flamenco canon?
The history of flamenco is not merely a chronicle of music and dance; it is a history of the structural dynamics of knowledge production. At the heart of this history sits the intellectual broker – the scholar, the writer, and the academic mediator who has historically claimed the authority to validate which styles constitute “authentic”…