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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Ian BiddleORCiD
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This book, written in an accessible and open style, on the one hand offers English speakers an overview of flamenco as a musical form or set of musical practices, and, on the other, uses flamenco to interrogate some of the ways in which social bonds and ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ are played out by both flamenco musicians and lovers of flamenco in Southern Spain. The book is divided into six chapters (including the introductory chapter and a concluding chapter) and is based on research undertaken in Spanish archives and at flamenco performances at local peñas and tablaos on trips to Madrid, Seville, Granada and Málaga funded by the British Academy in 2013-2015. The book aims to be both introductory (in that it assumes no prior knowledge of flamenco, introducing and explaining terms and concepts carefully and systematically) and analytical (in both the music-analytical sense of the term and in the sense of ‘critical’, drawing, that is, on recent developments in the fields of affect theory, critiques of identity and identity politics and gender and sexuality studies). The book differs from much Spanish- and English-language scholarship on flamenco in that it: Offers detailed and technical engagement with musical examplesSeeks to represent recent and classic Spanish-language scholarship to an English audienceSeeks to balance the demands of music-analytical approaches and cultural/contextual approachesSeeks to give voice to ‘insider’ narratives about flamenco from within the flamenco-practising communities formed since the beginning of the twentieth centuryOffers gender and sexuality-inflected analyses of flamenco largely missing from the scholarship to dateDiscusses how flamenco practices and identities have been represented on film (in both narrative cinema and in documentaries)Offers a detailed and critical discography of flamenco from 1901 through to the present
Author(s): Biddle I
Publication type: Authored Book
Publication status: In Press
Year: 2026
Number of Pages: 250
Acceptance date: 27/01/2026
Publisher: Routledge
Place Published: New York and London
