Melodies Heard and Unheard: The Promise and Limits of Cultural Diplomacy Through Music

The growth of interest in cultural diplomacy—the use of cultural tools to promote diplomatic goals—acknowledges at once the potential power of culture to mediate often tense political fields and the failure of traditional diplomacy to achieve its goals alone. While on the one hand we can celebrate examples of cultural diplomacy in such areas as gastronomy, music, theater, and cinema, among other forms, on the other hand we should be careful to note that these varieties of “soft power” (Nye 1990) are typically meant to advance the goals of nation-building and are deeply implicated in neo-liberal practices of consumption. Moreover, they are often implicated in hegemonic and even chauvinistic nationalist ideologies, including those reinforced by “hard power.” In the end, the promise of intercultural harmony risks devolving into unproductive dissonance. These contradictions should come as no surprise given what scholars have noted for decades now concerning the operations of culture in an age of globalization (Appadurai 1990, Featherstone 2020, Lechner and Boli 2020, among others).