#professionalisation
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The Economics of Exile: Patronage, Migration, and the Itinerant Flamenco Artist during the Crisis of the State, 1923–1939
The collapse of the Restoration regime and the subsequent dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) fractured the traditional geographic enclaves of Andalusia, driving performers into the expanding metropolitan networks of Madrid, Barcelona, and international circuit destinations. Canonical historiography frequently treats the Golden Age as a stable, regionally bounded ecosystem of the café cantante, yet…
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Disciplining the cante: From café cantante to Tablao
The performance spaces of flamenco have always been deeply intertwined with the material realities of Spanish politics and capital. The transition from the late nineteenth-century café cantante to the mid-twentieth-century tablao represents a deliberate restructuring of cultural production. By examining the political economy of the tablao, we uncover the mechanisms through which the regime of General Francisco Franco instrumentalised an…
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The Modernist Invention of Tradition: Re-evaluating the 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo
A persistent characteristic of the historiography of flamenco’s Golden Age (c. 1870–1930) is the tendency to impose a narrative of decline and rescue. The most prominent casualty of this approach is the Concurso de Cante Jondo, held in Granada during the festival of Corpus Christi on 13 and 14 June 1922. Standard historical accounts frame…
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Labour, industry, and the professionalisation of the cantaora
The transition of flamenco from domestic and communal spaces (of, for example, the juerga or the latifundio) to the commercial stage represents a significant shift in the socio-economic status of the cantaora and the cantaor. This process, in the last decades of the 19th century, was not merely a change in venue but a fundamental restructuring of…