Cross-cultural hybridization as a key to the formation of the new flamenco: Historical-sociological, analytical and comparative aspects

Abstract

This article analyzes the musical fusion or miscegenation in the new Flamenco since the theoretical framework of the cross-cultural hybridization of contemporary Spanish popular music of an ethnic type and as a manifestation of what Douglas Kellner calls' a postmodern image culrure »(Kellner, 1992: 141-177). In the foreground, we underline with Wolfgang Welsch that transculturality is not a new historical phenomenon, but emerged as an analytical concept from the decade of 1980 due to the reorientation of sociology towards cultural processes (Eickelpasch, 1997; Smith, 1998; Lutter / Reisenleitner, 1998) and has since become a suitable instrument to explain many of the contemporary cultural phenomena (Welsch, 1999). In this way —and to highlight the artistic-aesthetic effects of the current cultural dynamics - we will use it to explain why and how the new flamenco has constituted during the last three decades in an important musical manifestation international.