Loading... Occitan Music Revitalization as Radical Cultural Activism

What is it about?

The resurgence of Occitan popular music traditions in France is coterminous with the emergence of postcolonial regionalism during the 1970s Larzac protests, following the wave of decolonization in the 1960s and anticipating the anti-globalization movement in subsequent decades. Situated within this continuum of postcolonial and transnational cultural activism, Occitan music practitioners are uniquely positioned to embody a radically inclusive conception of Occitan identity by embracing the intercultural dimension of their Mediterranean musical heritage. Reconciling regional specificity and cultural hybridity can thus offer creative ways of resisting nationalist constructions of identity and neoliberal representations of global culture.

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Why is it important?

This paper examines the political implications of the traditional music revival movement within the “imagined community” (Anderson) of Occitania, a vast and bio-culturally diverse area extending from Bordeaux and Toulouse in southwestern France to the Piedmont valleys of Italy, and from Marseille and the Provencal Alps in southeastern France to the Aran Valley in Catalonia on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Occitan is a critically endangered regional language, and in his preface to Chansons d’amour en provence [Love Songs in Provence], Charles-Dominique contends that the on-going transmission of traditional songs in Occitania demonstrates the resilience of cultural memory embedded in these songs, whose dynamic reactivation can reveal the contemporary relevance and future potentialities of the Occitan cultural heritage (8-9). Building upon cultural historian Herman Lebovics’s discussion of the influential social movement that unfolded in Occitania in the 1970s, I position Occitan music revitalization as a radical form of cultural activism that aims to overcome deeply entrenched prejudices against expressions of regional, linguistic, and ethnic diversity linked to France’s colonial legacy by offering productive ways of resisting nationalist discourses premised on cultural normativity and exploring creative alternatives to neo-liberal globalization.

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