Resumen de Anti-racism in "War" and "Africanos en Madrid": a contrastive cultural analysis
Cultural studies analyzes culture understood as the whole system of practices or representations through which a social group's identity is created, maintained and reconstructed. These representations comprise texts (whether oral or written), visual or aural symbols, rules of behaviour, etc., all of which mold every component of social life at different levels: class, gender, race, sexuality, age, ethnicity. A resulting major task of this type of studies is to examine the relationship between social power and cultural structures. Rooted within this theoretical framework, the present paper includes the contrastive cultural analysis of two songs: "War", by the Jamaican Bob Marley and the Wailers (1976) and "Africanos en Madrid", by the Spanish Amistades Peligrosas (1991). The topic in the two compositions is racism. In each song there exists a major point of view, both of which coincide in their condemnation of this phenomenon. However, they differ in the manner this criticism is expressed owing to racial, social and historical divergences. The objective of this paper is to unravel this pair of stances and the resulting attitudes regarding the other parties involved. For that purpose we have drawn upon three approaches. Firstly, the Ethnography of Communication (M. SAVILLE-TROIKE 1992), which supplied a basic context for the analysis through the examination of generic aspects of the songs regarded as communicative acts (setting, participants, purpose, key/tone, etc.). Secondly, and within Critical Discourse Analysis, the theory of Social Psychology (J. POTTER and M. WETHERELL 1987, additionally complemented by T. A. VAN DIJK 1996). This one allowed for the discernment of the social categories reflected in the texts. Thirdly, Discursive Psychology (D. EDWARDS 1997), which revealed the conceptions of the individual selfs present in the songs towards both the social entities they are ascribed to and the remaining ones. The aplication of these approaches contributed to untangle the different devices used in Marley's shaping as the speaker of the victims of racism, in accordance with his label as a Rasta prophet and the first Third World Star by his followers. The implementation of these theories equally helped to uncover the strategies aimed at portraying the Spanish singers as non-racist citizens, since by race they belong to the traditionally oppressor group: whites.
