Performing the ‘anti-Spanish’ body: Jazz and biopolitics in the early Franco regime (1939–1957)

Abstract

Through the study of censorship, legislation, the press, recordings and photographs, this chapter examines jazz as symbolic reference and musical practice in Franco’s Spain and argues that it played a contestatory role during the so-called ‘early Francoism’ period (1939–1957). The dictatorship that General Franco established after the Spanish Civil War intensively and systematically used culture and music as propaganda to define its image and shape public opinion. By its connotations and active presence, jazz became one of the main negative references of the new regime against which to define Spanish race and music under the precepts of nationalism, Catholicism and fascism. When the course of the Second World War threatened the authority of the Franco regime and its international position from 1944, the positive references to American music in the media served as examples of the tolerance, renovation and pro-Allies orientation of the dictatorship. As such, it is difficult to find an explicit official condemnation of jazz in Spain after 1945. Nevertheless, jazz dancing continued to be a subversive practice under the Franco regime until the mid-1950s. That subversion was not an intellectual and rational political gesture, but rather a challenge to Francoist biopolitics, the official precepts on morality and the body. Swing and boogie-woogie were directly linked to physical pleasure and corporeal liberation, opposed to the stoicism and restraint promoted by the regime’s moral authorities. Consequently, the dictatorship tried to impose continuous constraints on jazz through recreational and fiscal policies, which remained active even after the official discourse about American music changed in the mid-1940s.