Flamenco Deep Song

by Timothy Mitchell

The dramatic and erotic folk-musical style known as flamenco arose among the stigmatized outgroups of Andalusia - fugitive Jews, Moors, gitanos, blind beggars, harlots, and others - but was quickly embraced and canonized as a fine art by Spanish aristocrats. This lively, highly readable book by Timothy Mitchell is the first full-length investigation of flamenco as well as an absorbing introduction to the cultural psychology of Spain itself. With an arsenal of critical theories honed to a sharp polemical edge, the author targets racialist and politicized mystifications of flamenco and deflates the still-influential primitivism of de Falla and Lorca. He demonstrates that flamenco is a densely historical phenomenon, whose "moods and musical techniques alike are inseparable from alcohol abuse." The denizens of saloons, bordellos, and prisons poured out their woes in guttural deep song, and their haunting cries and brash guitars were quickly taken up by the playboy-philanthropists who frequented the dives. Performers of deep song explored every painful aspect of tragic love; male singers told of having their hearts trampled by some dark-skinned dancer, females of having been abandoned or battered by their men. Guitarists were often expected to double as pimps. Flamenco artistry as we know it today makes sublime psychodrama out of alcoholism, fatalism, masochism, and ethnic rivalry. Mitchell's scholarship sparkles with irony and anecdotes drawn from two centuries of untranslated works. Ultimately he confronts the crucial question: Why does flamenco deep song appeal to people who never shared the traumas that precipitated its birth?

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 1994

About the author

Professor

Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures

Columbia University

612 Kent Hall, Mail Code 3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.

New York, NY 10027

Tel: 212-854 5252
Email: tm2421@columbia.edu







Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.

Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.

Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.

His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism.

Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.

Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review, Middle East Report (where he has also been chair of the editorial committee), Social Text, Society and Space, the Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Development and Change. He has been invited to lecture at most leading research universities in the United States, and at universities and academic conferences in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Several of his wri