It is a palpable reality that we have to congratulate ourselves on. flamenco It has been the subject of intense scientific research for several decades, although it is always insufficient, especially in some aspects. This work that we are discussing is added to the flamenco bibliography that we follow as fans and critics.
Its title clearly explains the content it attempts to clarify: interculturality, ethnicity, gender issues and, finally, commitment and class identification. Social aspects addressed by accredited specialists, some of whom are also artists of the flamenco, Such as Juan Pinilla, Manuel Gerena, Rocio Marquez, Fernando López Rodríguez o Laura VitalThey are accompanied by the editors or coordinators of the book: the professor and activist singer Miguel Lopez Castro, PhD with a thesis on women in the flamenco and expert in teaching flamenco, and the professor, doctor and guitarist Victor Pastor Perez, as well as the sociologist Francisco Aix, the professor of Anthropology Cristina Cruces, the investigator Jose L. Jimenez, the art historian and stage director Miguel Angel Vargas, Kloric Woman (formed by the singer Alice Carrasco and the guitarist Jose Manuel Leon), the researcher Loren Chuse and the committed sociologist and singer-songwriter Lourdes pastor.
We show an example of the social denunciation activity of the coordinator Miguel López Castro, in this YouTube link singing a peculiar denunciation lyric, adapted to the moment:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=297547692763131
They address topics such as flamenco and politics, the music of al-Andalus and the flamenco, Sephardic music and the flamenco, identity and the political subject, the flamenco in education as a political option or gender issues, among others (there are also interviews, such as with Manuel Gerena, and personal experiences, such as those of Laura Vital or Rocío Márquez, uniting the artistic, the personal and research).
Let's listen to a cante from one of the most important artists flamencos committed, if not the most. Manuel Gerena singing to the poet, of course, Miguel Hernández, one of its references. These are the famous, tender and painful Onion lullabies.
A mosaic of approaches and approximations, of unequal level of interest, research depth and expressive quality, something normal among such a large and diverse group, arising from a specific experience such as the set of presentations from two courses of the International University of Andalusia (UNIA), developed at its headquarters in Málaga in 2019 and 2022. One of the aforementioned coordinators, López Castro, in the introduction, comments that he wanted to unite "two parallel and compatible, additive views. On the one hand, the academic, investigative view that analyzes from a global and profound perspective. And, on the other hand, also from the view that is developed from experience and understanding, in the first person, that which is acquired from within the fabric flamenco as an artist." We discussed this earlier and it is one of the successes of the work, a contribution to the knowledge of flamenco that fans should read with the same passion with which they were written. Knowledge, you know, does not take away passion. And vice versa.
Miguel Lopez Castro and Victor Pastor Perez, coordinators,
Flamenco. Interculturality, ethnicity, gender and class commitment and identification (UNIA, Seville, 2023)
