Popular Music and Public Diplomacy ― Transnational and Transdisciplinary Perspectives

In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the twentieth century saw a growing presence of various popular genres in diplomatic contexts, including rock, punk, reggae, and hip-hop. This volume illuminates the interrelation of popular music and public diplomacy from a transnational and transdisciplinary angle. The contributions argue that, as popular music has been a crucial factor in international relations, its diplomatic use has substantially impacted the global musical landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Mario Dunkel teaches in the music department of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. His articles have appeared in American Music, Popular Music and Society, The European Journal of Musicology, and other outlets. He is also the author of Aesthetics of Resistance: Charles Mingus and the Civil Rights Movement. His research interests include transcultural music pedagogy, the practice and repercussions of German music diplomacy as well as the conceptualization and performance of music history in Europe and the U.S.

Sina A. Nitzsche is an instructor and researcher at the Department of American Studies at the Technical University Dortmund. She is coeditor of the essay collections Hip-Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows and Breaking the Panel!: Comics as a Medium. Her research interests focus on the intersections of cultural studies, media studies, and urban studies, with a particular emphasis on hip-hop, the Bronx, urban theory, and popular cultures.