Cosmopolitan Hubs: Glocalization and Non-native culture brokers in the globalization of popular music cultures

From 2013-2016, during ethnographic fieldwork on the globalization of flamenco, I visited Jerez de la Frontera in AndalucÍa, Spain for the annual Festival de Jerez – a 10-day flamenco spectacular featuring legends, innovators and up-and-comers of the Spanish scene. In the temperate days of late February, the city hosts performances across multiple venues, as well as lectures and lesson packages. Flamenco, as a culture or ‘art complex’ (Aoyama 2007), encompasses singing, guitar, dancing, percussion and audience involvement. Gestival activities run all day and night. The streets and tavernas are filled with sights and sounds of flamenco and its aficionados discussing festival events. However, despite the festival being a site for the celebration of Spain’s most iconic art form, one notices when wandering the various events that, while most performers and teachers are Spanish, the majority of attendees are foreign – an observation corroborated herein through interviews and participant observation. Some hail from nearby countries in Western Europe, others from as far afield as the Americas, Japan and Taiwan. While this demographic is perhaps surprising, it indicates a larger trend of non-Spaniards having a greater appreciation for flamenco, becoming its primary consumers at home and culture brokers abroad.
I was invited to the festival by a British flamenco dancer who attended annually to receive lessons and watch performances. Christine would come to learn new skills and routines and to meet artists and gathering knowledge that informed her teaching, performances and events in Cheshire. I joined Christine and other foreign aficionados on the routes of the festival, enjoying the official performances and classes, as well as tavern jam sessions and peñas. On one memorable occasion, I participated in an impromptu 5am dance-off between a Taiwanese friend and some bakers just as the day’s fresh rolls were coming out of the oven. My interviews and participant observations with Jerez flamenco aficionados suggested that, while locals considered the festival good for business and an appropriate depiction of the art complex, activities were not typically marketed towards the Spanish and were priced higher than local audiences could afford. Subsequent interviews with flamenco practitioners in nearby Spanish cities revealed they would never consider attending because of the price.
At one of the world’s biggest flamenco festivals, attended by 20,000 yearly, in a country that has popularised the art complex as a symbol of national identity, why is the target audience mainly foreign? While some visitors are wealthy, curious tourists consuming exoticism, others, such as Christine, have a pre-existing passion and visit to be able to return to their homelands with skills and cultural knowledge. I will later describe these individual non-native culture brokers as ‘cosmopolitan hubs’, uniting Kiwan and Meinhof’s (2011) ‘human hubs’ and Hannerz’s (1990) ‘globalization of cosmopolitanism’ to denote a proclivity towards experiencing aspects of global cultures. Foreign flamenco scenes exist globally and are typically perpetuated by these cosmopolitan hubs rather than by Spanish practitioners.
Although foreign interest in flamenco is particularly evident at the Festival de Jerez, it exists across Spain’s various local flamenco scenes: flamenco is a cultural industry sustained by local professionals and foreign fascination. But how have these foreigners developed such an affinity that they travel afar to experience it then bring it back to sustain scenes in their home countries? The answer lies in a complex web of music globalization processes, tourism and assumed or assigned national identities arbitrated by individual culture bearers.