That's how we sound! Re-articulating nation through music performance in La Escena Independiente in Lima, Peru

That's how we sound! Re-articulating nation through music performance in La Escena Independiente in Lima, Peru Müller, Malena This thesis explores how the nation is articulated through the performance of music by analysing ways in which music performance affords the participants – musicians and audiences alike – a space to re-produce and co-articulate the nation. The research is situated in Lima, Peru. The analysis focuses on the discourses and practices of five bands and one solo artist: Barrio Calavera, Eme, Karolinativa, La Nueva Invasión, Olaya Sound System and Tourista from La Escena Independiente (The Independent Scene). The analysis aims to illustrate how they imagine and re-articulate contemporary Peruvianness. It concentrates on the role of space in the imagining of community and the way the participants inhabit the space of the performance as a means to negotiate Peruvianness. The thesis draws on recent scholarship in the field of nationalism studies exploring how the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) is practised and embodied, emphasising the individual’s agency (Antonsish 2015) in the articulation and negotiation of the nation. This research builds on these approaches to study the nation in combination with the concept of ‘musicking’ (Small 1998) and the notion of music performance as a social performance (McCormick 2015) of self. Based on Auslander’s (2014) model of performance persona, the study elaborates on how the musicians ground their vision of Peruvianness and claims of musical authenticity in their biographies and how they conceive their music, performance and the conventions of La Escena Independiente as means to convey and enact it. Further, the analysis explores possible approaches to understanding the audience’s practices as active participation in articulating nation.