Politics, Spaces, and Aesthetics: Some Thoughts on the Genre of Protest Music—Debayan Das

As Rancière said, “everything in politics turns on the distribution of spaces… political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of places and roles.” But re-figuring of space, particularly physical space, is difficult in many orientalist nations, like India and Japan. This can be attributed to a couple of reasons. First, wide-open public spaces are in short supply, especially near symbols of power; there is no equivalent to the Rajpath in the National Capital Territory of India, a vast space in sight of the ‘men in power’. As a result, many Indian demonstrations, especially students’ protests take place through public places, where they must deal with the police. Second, the police force seems disproportionately large at these students’ protests, most of the times outnumbering the protesters. Police intimidate protesters by lining up in large numbers and staring them down; they ride in elevated cars; they take notes and photos of protesters, which are filed. Such actions intimidate many people, particularly students or employees of well-known corporations, from solidarizing with these protests.

The police always attempt to minimize the visibility of the protest. At most protests that I have been a part of, they surround the protest, making it invisible to passers-by. Instead of letting protesters take up an entire avenue, as many American protests do, the police restrict the protesters to one lane of a multilane road. In a protest march, the police break up demonstrators into smaller groups, typically of a few hundred people maximum, spaced several city-blocks apart. Bystanders are often unaware of the entire extent of the protest.

There also exists a dichotomous relationship as well as tension between music and political space. This article attempts to explain how music is deployed to support the status quo or to create a counter narrative. Provided the proper political space, music played an important role in many wars of liberation as the liberation armies and parties employed it to challenge the status quo. Freedom fighters kept their spirits up through music; they celebrated their victories and mourned the loss of fellow fighters in music. However, corruption, lack of tolerance, shrinking democratic space, insensitivity to criticism and crass materialism impose a limitation on the proliferation of such music.

On the other hand, music also plays a significant role in order to ensure inclusivity in a political protest. The relationship between music and politics and specifically that between music and protest has been relatively under-researched in the social sciences in a systematic manner, even if actual experiences of music being used to express dissent have been innumerable. Further, the conceptual analysis that has been thrown up from the limited work that is available focuses mostly on Euro-American experiences with music of resistance.

However, in societies where most music is not written down or notated formally, the discussions on the distinct role that music can play as an art form, as a vehicle through which questions of artistic representation can be addressed, and the specific questions that are addressed and responded to when music is used for political purposes, have been reflected in the music itself, and not always in formal debates. It is only in using the music itself as text and a whole range of information around its creation—often, largely anecdotal and highly context dependent—that such music can be understood. Doing so across a whole range of non-Western experiences brings out the role of music in societal change quite distinctly from the Euro-American cases. Discussions are presented about the informed perceptions about what protest music is and should be across varied, yet specific experiences. It is based on the literature that has come out of the Euro-American world as well as from parts that had experienced European colonialism and have made the transition into the post-colonial in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Despite the recognition of the social importance of music, and that social structures and developments can be reflected in varied ways in musical structures, music has not been given a fair hearing in the social sciences. If little systematic investigation into the relation of music to culture or society as a whole has been made, even less effort has been expended on understanding the relationship between music and politics. Music has represented a mode of expression for human beings’ interaction with their surroundings, making it a spontaneous medium for expressing their discontent with it as well. This discontent has, in varied historical and geographical contexts, been expressed through words, without words, through appraisal, evaluation, and often rejection of certain canonical forms, and through creation of new forms.

Further, structures of authority have used music as a medium or mode for transmitting political information and values, mobilizing the population, evoking and sustaining pride and identity, and legitimizing patterns of authority. Despite there being a long history of the connection between music and politics, in the role of music as a medium or an instrument of political communication, in critiquing existing social contexts and norms or in expressing protest against those norms, the corpus of work on music and politics has remained rather scant.

To sum up, the relationship between music, spaces and protest have, in practice, been around questions that straddle the realms of both aesthetics and politics. The combined aesthetic-political considerations have involved issues of representation (how to represent political identities) as well as function (what the functions of protest music are). Socio-historical contexts have influenced both these representational and functional questions, generating great diversity regarding their spatial aspects as well. Thus, different kinds of music, performed or conceptualized in different contexts, have engaged with politics and spaces in different ways. The functions and meanings of different types of music are employed variously, making the protest music genre historically complex and highly evolved, as this article has attempted to bring out.