The main focus of the methodological construction is to figure out what leads to better cultural promotion. To make the research clearer, I had to come up with two cases that have several similar backgrounds. In this sense, the two jazz tour cases are the most appropriate because the two events have things in common, but the significant difference was the identity of performers – which I have desired to examine.
2.3 Conclusion
This chapter has discussed theoretical approaches and methodology to test the thesis discussed in the next chapter.
On one hand, propagandists – based on realism – observes cultural diplomacy as an instrument of state policy with limited private participation (Vaughan, 2007). On the other hand, culture promotors perceive cultural diplomacy as mainly the promotion abroad of a state’s cultural achievements, its science, technology as well as the arts, humanities, social sciences, and national languages (Berridge and James 2003: 62).
Though the two different schools of thoughts put different emphasis on the concept and functions of cultural diplomacy, it is inevitably true that there is great potential for governments to work together with non-governmental bodies – for instance, not only NGOs, but also citizens, artists and so on – to promote mutual understanding of different nation-states. Another inevitable truth in cultural diplomacy is that the state cannot and ought not to disappear from it. To sum up, what complicates cultural diplomacy is the fact that there are so many actors are involved in this field, unlike other areas of diplomacy, many which are not necessarily conscious they are engaging in or supporting cultural diplomacy. States cannot achieve much without cooperating with non-governmental across – such as artists and students. Once these actors interfere/get involved, original interests of the government – such as lines of policy, targets and even definition of state interests – become blurred, multiply or might even be intentionally corrupted. Identity of actors seem to be crucial to decide whether cultural-diplomatic activities will be successful or not.
In the methodology part, the successfulness of cultural diplomacy has been set up as the degree of cultural promotion – dependent variable ‘Y’. The rest of the thesis will apply CHA to two historical cases of jazz tours by; 1) famous musicians and 2) university jazz bands.
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Chapter 3: Case study
Cultural diplomacy is a set of activities – which are undertaken directly by or in collaboration with diplomatic authorities of a state – with aims to promote of foreign policy interests of this state in the realm of cultural policy primarily by means of fostering its cultural exchange with other (foreign) states. (Pajtinka, 2014). During Cold War era, cultural-diplomatic events were the most powerful tools for the promotion of ideological goals and strategies (Gienow-Hecht and Donfried, 2013:16). The past decade has witnessed a dramatic growth in musicological interest in the Cold War, as well as a turn toward cultural history among diplomatic historians (Abrams-Ansari, 2013:211).
Additionally, Gienow-Hecht and Donfried (2013) argued that the US government became the key propagandist of American values and consumer goods in the early state of the Cold War because it employed psychological warfare and cultural infiltration to weaken the opponent and its alien sates on the other side of the Iron Curtain (p.15). In this time, the U.S. government paid significant attention to send jazz musicians and university students to different regions to perform as Cold War diplomats. The U.S. government attempted to spread the U.S. messages and ideology to many people in to world through any means. However, it turned out to be unilateral rather than developing entirely mutual cultural exchange. For example, the U.S. sent out more musicians than it received as guests (U.S. Department of State, 1953). In 1953, International lnformation Administration (IIA) published a pamphlet with a diaper depicting ‘cultural flow’ from the U.S. to Country X (Figure 2).
(Fig2. Diagram depicting the cultural flow of information from the U.S to Country X, Source: IIA, 1953:8)
Fosler-Luisser (2010) argued that the concept of the diagram looks simple, but also includes complex purposes and effects that were manifest in cultural presentations. The government perceived that ‘soft flow’ – that is sense of connection – could foster the sense of transnational connections with more audiences worldwide. Therefore, it started organising and funding different groups of performers in different events.
Broadly, there were two groups of performers funded by USIA; first, students in University of Michigan Jazz band; second, ensembles led by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and others. As previously discussed, CHA will be applied to investigate the causal relationship between different identities of performers and the degree of success/achievement of the events.
3.1 Jazz tour by University of Michigan students in Latin America
From January to May 1965, the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department’s Cultural Presentations Program (CPP) (Fosler-Luisser, 2010:59). In this period, Central and South America and Caribbean regions were important battlegrounds for cold war ideologies.
These tours were carefully designed by officials at the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA) with Foreign Service officers in U.S. embassies all over the world. As an evidence, at meeting of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB)’s Working Group on Cultural Activities, representatives of the State Department, USIA, Foreign Operations Administration, CIA and other departments – such as Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Department of Labour, Department of Defense attended and discussed the Jazz tours (Osgood, 2006). The U.S. officials tried to engage as many participants as time and resources would permit (Fosler-Luisser, 2010:60), so embassies publicised concerts widely and made opportunities for visiting musicians and local politicians to meet each other. This was a great chance for university students as well because they could meet cultural figures and had jam sessions after concerts as well. All these efforts ‘aimed to build cultural and political connections in each locality within the span if a visit lasting only a few days’ (ibid).
The government officials who planned cultural and informational propaganda referred this jazz tour as ‘a unidirectional instrument’ – which means that they aimed for international understanding and mutual respect. To secure funding from Congress to continue the CPP, the State Department had to produce regular reports about the effectiveness of the tours (Evidence of Effectiveness, Series 2). These reports described how cultural presentations programs altered public opinion abroad by demonstrating the sophistication and worth of US culture; whenever possible, they related the performer’s achievement to concrete propaganda objectives (Fosler-Luisser, 2010:62).
According to Post from interviews, students participated in the tours representing the nation, but not government. Although only a few members spoke Spanish, their language capacity was not enough for political communication (ibid, 74). Most of the occasions were for person-to-person exchange as socialising and dancing rather than having a discourse about political matters. Plus, student musicians from the U.S. made friendly personal contacts with Latin Americans through impromptu conversations and transient personal contact (ibid). These were clearly meaningful in terms of building international connections and having U.S. relations with Latin American public. Kuiser (2000) analysed that there was a cultural transfer – from “top-down” perspective to “bottom-up” in the jazz tours – mostly thanks to day to day activities of the musicians. In the transfer there might have been several forms of engagement, encouragement of subcultural groups – who became more attached to U.S. culture, or even personal relationship with the musicians.
Nevertheless, the question is whether the effects of this work were long-lasting. As shown, the most meaningful aspects of the tour was to make constructive contact and fruitful relationship, but Fosler-Luisser (2010) still concluded that the shift in thinking of local people’s understanding of U.S. in the cold war was subtle. Even though global ties and opportunities to communicate with foreign public were created from the tours, it does not mean that the U.S. culture were either significantly or long-lastingly promoted. Moreover, the university students were sent to rural areas – where people felt grateful that anyone had come at all (Fosler-Lussier, 2010:78). This indicates that the audiences are more unlikely to visit the performers in the U.S. Furthermore, the concert at the Central University of Venezuela was even canceled because of a strike by Communist students (New York Times, 1965). Latin Americans considered the tours were strictly one-sided, imperialist policy instruments (Fosler-Lussier, 2010:63).
To sum up, the University of Michigan jazz band’s tour was not an opportunity to promote U.S. culture, but to make personal contact with foreign public. It had diplomatic achievement – that is building of international connections; personal contacts to help strengthening the connection with the political figures, such as ambassadors and officials. Channels of communication built by government-sponsored musicians were helpful in terms of political interest, but culturally speaking the program was limited.
3.2 Jazz tour by musicians eg. Louis Armstrong
In the mid-1950s, the world-famous jazz artists participated in State Department-sponsored world tours. In this program, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and others were sent to all over the world – Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. The main aim of the tour was to showcase U.S. virtues of freedom, creativity, and democracy in pointed contrast to Soviet cultural production (Eschen, 2004).
They had an opportunity to hang out and jam with kindred souls among foreign nationals, align their struggles as subaltern Americans with liberation movements in other countries, and broaden their own sense of transnational identity (Stowe, 2010:317). Osgood (2006) claimed that “American psychological programs had a global reach” (p.3) – as an instance, cultural diplomacy and public information programs affect attitudes over a longer time horizon (Osgood, 2006:17-18). In 1965, Edmund Gullion, the former U.S. ambassador to the Congo, also described that cultural diplomacy led to the “transnational flow of information and ideas” (Cull, 2008:259-60) – the image of “flow” implying that the movement of intangibles was unfettered, perhaps even reciprocal.
U.S. musicians’ goodwill tours to foreign countries were a celebrated staple of cold war cultural life – famous musicians such as Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong and so on toured the world to great acclaim. From this, The State Department was paying for a well-established image, a “brand,” by employing famous musicians (Devlin, 2015:142). The musicians kept making efforts in their own way to promulgate the dynamism of American democracy even after the tours. For example, Dave Brubeck wrote an autobiography of his jazz life and things that the tours connoted. Brubeck and Armstrong created the jazz musical The Real Ambassadors, a semi-satirical commentary- which was a reductive description of the work on the State Department’s approach to musical diplomacy (Armstrong and Brubeck, 1962). One of the well-known lines of the Real Ambassadors is “no commodity is quite so strange as this thing called cultural exchange”. Their amazement of the power of jazz in cultural diplomacy was expressed by the musicians and became known to a wider range of audiences compared to the tours delivered by the students from university of Michigan jazz band.
In conclusion, the U.S. musicians’ goodwill tours were successful in many senses. Like the first case of university students in Latin America, they could have mutual understandings in jam sessions. Although they did not make personal contact, the professional artists were significant and experienced enough to influence more audiences in the world. This case is clearly distinct from the case of University of Michigan jazz band because jazz diplomacy developed by the constant contact of professional performers with diverse musical influences both within and outside America. (Stowe, 2010:318).
The two cases of jazz diplomacy indeed have similarities and differences. In the next section ‘evaluation’, the similarities will be constant independent variables and the difference in identity of performers will test if it had an effect on cultural promotion.
3.3 Evaluation
In both cases of tours performed by University of Michigan jazz band and world-famous U.S. jazz musicians, the jazz performers were composed of mixed race to counter the racist image of the United States prevalent (not without reason, of course) in Communist nations (Devlin, 2015:142). One of the main goals of the State Department funding the jazz tours in particular – not other genres of music is because the tours were promoted by not only caucasians, but also African-American artists as well. These projects worked as not only propaganda methods and effects, but also an attempt to understand the transnational projects engaged in by governments during the cold war and to examine closely the particular relationships engendered by cultural diplomacy (Fosler-Lussier, 2010:64)
Davenport suggests that jazz revealed America's “softer and more civilised side," while the music also highlighted the nation's potential for achieving peace and interracial harmony (2009). She compared jazz to a “barometer of freedom” – which resulted in interesting and complex outcomes. The University band’s most conspicuous achievement was that it opened new channels of communication among members of select groups of people – including embassy stafff, Latin American students, and jazz fans – and fostered a variety of personal connections that furthered U.S interests. However, those personal connections were limited to be confirmed as a long-term relationships. Plus, their audiences were confined to South America and Caribbean countries. By contrast, the influence of tours performed by the U.S. musicians was comparatively larger – because it certainly reached more audiences in the world due to not only their fame, but also past experience. Additionally, the impression of the tours were continued even after the programs ended because the musicians were actively involved in spreading their culture in different forms. In other words, the degree of cultural promotion by experienced U.S. musicians was greater that the ones by inexperienced university students.
Based on the information, I have put the similarities – Jazz musicians, Government sponsorship and Mixed race as a constant independent variables in the chart 1. The identity of performers – that is university students (inexperienced/amateur) and professional artists (experienced) affected the dependent variable – the degree the degree of cultural promotion.