Hegemony

Hegemony is a key term in critical theory and cultural studies, derived by Italian social and political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Writing in the Marxist tradition of social criticism, Gramsci theorized a cultural hegemony where nation-states employ institutions from their cultural sphere to maintain power in their capitalist society. Scholars from the British School of Cultural Studies, founded at the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, appropriated Gramsci's theory of hegemony in the 1960s and incorporated it in their criticism and analysis of popular culture, including popular music. Since this early moment in the history of cultural studies, hegemony has played a noted part in the social and cultural analyses of music. Postcolonial theorist Edward Said (1935–2003) also incorporated hegemony in his musical and cultural criticism in the years surrounding the birth of British cultural studies and its analysis of music in popular culture.

As an artistic and cultural form, music is an important mechanism for understanding ideological intentions and the changing political and [Page 547]economic tenor of the times. This is evident in its own development and written history because music itself has been endlessly categorized and divided against itself. As music is concerned, the history of the culture concept and that of the nation-state have a symbiotic relationship. The difficulty of distinguishing an object of study—namely, a nation—from the analytical tools and methods used to delineate and evaluate such an object (e.g., historicism, the culture concept, ethnography) renders critical intellectual engagement a complex and reflexive endeavor.

Concurrently, globalization, which means in practice the hegemony of norms and values ascribed to the largest and most powerful nations across the world, has reshaped nationalism as a language of defiance on the part of those excluded from its apparent benefits. This is the case whether nationalism is exploited by the nation-state mechanism itself or by fringe elements within it. In response to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the reunification of Germany in the 1990s, critical thinking has addressed both the apparent “exceptionally” of ethno-nationalist violence and the counterintuitive possibilities of good nationalism. One of the compelling difficulties in thinking about nationalism, for ethnomusicologists and others, remains that of taking a persistent and disturbing issue seriously.