Listening to a Mediterranean Geography o

The decade of the 1970s was marked by uprisings on both sides of the Mediterranean, by progressive movements that laid the groundwork for socio-political struggles in the face of evolving global structures of power, and by battles against leftist political movements in which the dominant systems adopted extreme means of police and military violence and repression. Using a broad definition of protest songs, the course focuses on the musicopoetic production of dissent as a site of social and political critique. It examines the link between different forms of protest, change, and socio-political meanings of musicopoetic expressions, and explores how songs articulating protest function in specific contexts and in relation to what should be understood as a geography of protest in the Mediterranean. To this end the course asks: what is a protest song? What kind of political and social action can a song take? How does a song reflect societal concerns?  And what impact have protest songs had in creating change? Organized through a series of case studies, the course looks at popular songs encoded with socio-political meaning that emerged during the 1970s around the shores of the Mediterranean. We will pay close attention to poetic texts, music features and performance styles to examine songs’ capacity to intervene in socio-political struggles of the past, and what these songs can still offer us in the present.