Humanities in Cultural Affairs

The third Humanities in Cultural Affairs workshop, “Can the Arts Change the World?

New Perspectives on the Problems and Possibilities of Cultural Exchange,” was co-chaired by Jane Goodman, Professor of Anthropology. The aim of this workshop was to reflect together on new models of cultural exchange through the arts. The workshop paired scholarly presentations with musical performances by the Bloomington-based Middle Eastern ensemble Salaam. Salaam kicked off the workshop with a performance as featured artists as part of Indiana University’s First Thursdays Festival on April 4, 2024. This performance, which presenters attended, took place in the IU Auditorium.  The workshop continued on Friday, April 5, with presentations by the four invited speakers followed by discussion with the audience. After lunch, Salaam returned for a mini-performance interspersed with comments and discussion with workshop participants (presenters and attendees) about their own experiences with using their music as part of cultural exchange.  The Friday events took place at the Cook Center for the Humanities in Maxwell Hall on the Indiana University campus.

Registration closed on March 29, 2024.

Executive Summary 

The arts have long been used as a tool in cultural diplomacy efforts. Historically, cultural exchange programs have entailed performers from one country or subculture producing their traditions for consumption by audiences from another. This model of exchange, rooted in the world exhibitions of the 19th century, has informed US-based initiatives from the "Good Neighbor Policy" of the 1930s to today's Center Stage program, funded by the US State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. However well-intentioned, such programs continue to be haunted by the unequal histories of circulation and exchange that have characterized the wider global order. Often state-driven and/or state-funded, these programs are imbricated in wider structures of inequality that have historically reinforced rather than challenged global hierarchies.

This workshop considered alternatives through which the arts could become a vehicle to generate intercultural dialogue, collaborate more equitably, and build new, more restorative or reparative alliances. I opened the workshop by giving a brief history of the use of the arts for cultural diplomacy, and shared some of my own experiences as a scholar who has both studied cultural exchange and has been involved, as a singer of world music, in performances and tours framed in terms of cultural exchange. The workshop convened four scholar-practitioners: three ethnomusicologists and one anthropologist who studies music. All participants are also musicians, and have brought musical performance into their scholarship in various ways. I sought to instantiate exchange in the workshop itself in two ways. First, I sought generational exchange by inviting scholars at different stages of their careers: the panel included one full professor, one associate professor, one assistant professor, and one lecturer. Second, I brought together scholars and scholar-musicians from different international locations. Our speakers came from institutions in the United States (Colgate University, American University), Europe (Keele University), and Scandinavia (University of Copenhagen). Collectively, our research has taken us to Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Peru, Bolivia, Japan, and beyond. This workshop also brought together academic and artistic modes of engagement with the arts, contending that these should not be separated.

I opened the workshop by posing two linked questions: (1) What can we add to better understand the subtle ways cultural exchange models may still be implicitly informed by neocolonial assumptions, or otherwise unwittingly reinforce global divides? (2) How can we envision more reciprocal forms of cultural exchange or encounter, and what might such engagements look like?  Can the arts open new, more equitable possibilities of relationship building and intercultural collaboration?  How can the arts anchor and inspire collaborative work that aims to restore justice and right historical imbalances? I summarize below what each participant contributed to the conversation.

Michelle Bigenho (Colgate University) has been publishing on heritage and performance for nearly three decades while also performing, recording, and touring with the Bolivian ensemble Música de Maestros (Music of the Masters), including a cultural exchange tour with the ensemble to Japan (the subject of her book Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan, 2012, Duke University Press). For her workshop presentation, Bigenho turned her attention to a project closer to home: she focused on an exchange that transpired in a university course on her own campus, which she team-taught with visiting Bolivian musicians, and in which students learned to play Andean instruments.  In so doing, she was seeking to move away from a consumptionist model of cultural exchange in which home audiences consume the cultural performance of a visiting group (as audience members, workshop attendees, etc.).  Instead, she considered the interactions between the Bolivian musicians and Colgate students through concepts of relationality (drawn from Indigenous studies) and the relational (drawn from feminist studies), looking at the interactions through the lenses of friendship, reciprocal exchange, social interdependence, and curricular value. Throughout her discussion, she drew on the Andean concept of ayni (reciprocity), which foregrounds connections and interactions over time while also recognizing asymmetries. Bigenho offered new ways of thinking about cultural exchange that, while not outside dominant relations of power, did afford new perspectives.

Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha (University of Copenhagen) opened by offering a provocative response to the question “Can the Arts Change the World”? She began by saying that she was tempted to answer no, fearing that the question risked essentializing the dynamic ideas it contains. She went on to argue that the notions “arts,” “change,” and “world” must be approached as dynamic processes capable of sustained renewal. It is in the relation among these elements that we see where the arts can reveal deeply rooted infrastructural imbalances and contribute to tangible transformation. She went on to outline a brief history of the use of music as a tool for cultural diplomacy (the subject of her recent co-edited volume Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East: Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21^st Century, 2024, Palgrave MacMillan), considering how long-established terms like “flow,” “exchange,” “bridge building,” and “mutual understanding” have in fact served to preserve hegemonic dominance by the global north. To reconceptualize the role of the arts in cultural diplomacy, she instead advanced three notions: “contingency,” which she used to refer to bottom-up, citizen- or artist-led initiatives; “epistemic disobedience” as a way of de-linking exchange initiatives from Western-dominated paradigms; and “value” as a way to activate and assess the capacity to act in order to achieve systemic change. She grounded her remarks in a case study drawn from her research in Kuwait with the Tajdīd min al-Dakhil (Renewal from Within) movement based on Lebanese Nahḍa (Arab Renaissance) music, with which she performed for many years as a musician. 

Kendra Salois (American University) began by reflecting on commonly used terms in intercultural musical collaborations that are typically linked to value, including “exposure,” “encounter,” and “exchange.” Although these terms are often used in the context of cultural exchange to evoke more equitable futures, she argued that in fact they can work to locate intercultural musicking within a frame of racial capitalism. She went on to consider musician-led intercultural collaborations, focusing on the Nafada project in Detroit, a musical and documentary film project bringing together female musicians from the Middle East and North Africa. Nafada was framed as an investment in Detroit’s cultural and economic resurgence, as evidenced by its debut at the city’s Concert of Colors (2022). The project was led by the Detroit-based arts collective Konqistador,  which describes itself as dedicated to “no borders, no boundaries” genre-bending music creation and performance. But as Salois detailed, this hopeful vision was in part undermined by tensions that emerged as the project unfolded. An appearance of intercultural dialogue may in fact have worked to sustain a field of difference that benefitted the organizers more than the musicians. As Salois concluded, the desire to find a utopian potential in intercultural musicking can blind participants to the hierarchical practices still embedded in our practices.

Fiorella Montero-Diaz (Keele University) spoke about her 15 years of research on intercultural and inter-class musical performances in Peru, looking at how such performances could contribute to concrete changes in policy. She focused on an alternative group of upper-class, elite Peruvian musicians, considering how they used fusion music (a blend of traditional Peruvian music with other genres) as a way of both reflexively critiquing their own whiteness/privilege and promoting this critique, through their music, within the larger Peruvian society. She discussed her own involvement as a musical consultant to the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s cultural and education program, which sought to expose children from different class and ethnic backgrounds to diverse musical repertoires (including fusion), and how this in turn helped to open up new possibilities for music-making as a force for social integration and inclusivity. She further proposed that ethnographic research itself has the “ripple effect” of sparking reflection and awareness among her collaborators, which in turn helped to catalyze processes of change. Montero-Diaz concluded by introducing her current project on LGBTI musical resistances in Latin America.  A special screening of her new film Sounding a Queer Rebellion: Musical Resistances in Latin America followed the workshop events and was attended by all speakers.  

The workshop closed with a mini-performance by Salaam, interspersed with commentary and discussion about their experiences as performers of Middle Eastern music in a range of settings.

Several threads that emerged across the four presentations. One was the idea of “value.” What is “value” in the context of the arts and cultural exchange? How do we assess the value of performance as a way of achieving change?  In what specific ways are exchange events being valued by performers, participants, funders, NGOs, or state agencies? Who benefits? Who does not? On whose labor is value built? Can we transcend capitalist notions of value to move toward something more equitable, reciprocal, and inclusive? A related question concerns change itself: how do we recognize (positive) change, and what confluence of factors helps to accelerate (positive) change in relation to the arts? A third question concerns translation: how do artistic projects translate to public policy and vice versa? Finally, how do performances of expressive culture translate – in the hands of scholar-practitioners –  to scholarship?