Post by Ian Biddle

Disciplining the cante: From café cantante to Tablao The performance spaces of flamenco have always been deeply intertwined with the material realities of Spanish politics and capital. The transition from the late nineteenth-century café cantante to the mid-twentieth-century tablao represents a deliberate restructuring of cultural production. By examining the political economy of the tablao, we uncover the mechanisms through which the regime of General Francisco Franco instrumentalised an art form - frequently born from structural marginality and subaltern resistance - into a highly commodified, state-sanctioned engine of mass tourism and capital accumulation....