The 2024 MMRC Lecture

Between Cultural Labor and Political Struggle: Music and Class

In view of the crisis-ridden character of global capitalism, the concept of class is receiving renewed attention across many scholarly disciplines. The 2024 MMRC Lecture invites different perspectives on the connections between class and music as a political instrument, an economic power relation and a creative, shared experience of self-determination and resistance across different geographical and historical contexts.

In her keynote, ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Ana Hofman (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana) focuses on the amateur-professional nexus to provide conceptual insights into the ideas of class stratification and class struggle and shows how music and sound have been involved in mobilizing against capitalist exploitation.

Cultural geographer and artist Anjeline de Dios (Manila) extends these reflections in her response by bringing in an intersectional reading of Race and/as Class, focusing on the geographical, material, and symbolic mobilities of migrant Filipino musicians as cultural workers, who are exploited by, but also challenge and resist the hierarchies of the international division of cultural labour.

They are complemented by a musical contribution of MC Mate Cosic aka Mata Granata (Croatia/Vienna), who raps about class as a shared experience of people from different cultural contexts, class struggles and the invisibility of migrant labour.

While all of the contributors focus on different geographical and historical contexts, their talks and music are intended to be starting points of a conversation about interconnections – between class and race, the histories of the so-called former Second World and the Global South, state socialism and overseas colonialism, struggles and mobilities.