Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism

In: Diplomatic history, Band 36, Heft 1, S. 53-64

Abstract

Beginning in 1954, the U.S. State Department sponsored a Cultural Presentations Program that sent thousands of musicians to distant lands. These tours aimed to enhance the reputation of American culture, create a positive impression of the United States and its foreign policy, and compete with the many Soviet and Chinese performers who traveled for similar propaganda purposes. In 1965, Edmund Gullion, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Congo, described the purpose of public diplomacy as the transnational flow of information and ideas, the image of flow implying that the movement of intangibles was unfettered, perhaps even reciprocal. My investigation draws on several disciplinary perspectives. The anthropologist Anna Tsing notes that in discussions of globalization, scholars who study culture tend to valorize the cultural flow . . . but not the carving of the channel that enables the flow. Tsing turns away from a focus on media (the how of intercultural connections) toward the political interests that fostered the creation of global ties (the why). By contrast, diplomatic historians have thoroughly charted the political motivations for carving the channel (why), but until recently they have attended less to the nuanced international relationships created by musicians (how). These two perspectives inform one another: attention to the practice of musical diplomacy on the ground can reveal how power was exerted through it. The largest body of relevant evidence was preserved by the State Department; although U.S. diplomats sometimes exaggerated the musicians' successes, they often included eyewitness accounts and local press reports that afford us glimpses of the musicians' actions and their reception. Though these sources cannot offer a complete or wholly unbiased picture, they do provide meaningful information about the channels of communication opened by musical diplomacy and the flows of power and culture within these channels. Adapted from the source document.