#vernacular agency
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The First Reviewers: Journalism and the Invention of Flamenco Criticism
When we look back at the Golden Age of flamenco (c. 1870–1930), analytical focus tends to rest entirely upon the performance spaces of the cafés cantantes or the private intimacy of the cuartos. Parallel to this musical practice, however, a significant textual industry was emerging within the daily press. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journalists,…
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The Flamenco Afición in the Golden Age: Understanding Audiences in the Cafés Cantantes
The afición, the dedicated, deeply knowledgeable community of devotees and expert amateurs whose collective passion and rigorous standards sustain the art form, was the driving force behind the reinvention of flamenco during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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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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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. However, a close reading of the transition into modernity reveals a different narrative: one of vernacular agency. This…