Events & Programs

Kelly Jakes will present her research on the ways that popular music served as a medium for dissent and weapon of resistance in German-occupied France between 1940 and 1945 from singing in the French Resistance and the role of jazz in the Zazou movement.

The folk and commercial songs of the era, she argues, were vital to the project of resistance because they offered citizens myriad opportunities for the reclamation of individual and national identity. Whether appropriating old WWI tunes or humming the melodies of “disreputable” jazz refrains, citizens searched for symbols that helped them imagine themselves in ways that subverted the new social order of Vichy, the collaborationist government, and mark themselves as guardians of a virile French republicanism, as fierce protectors of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Kelly Jakes is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Communication Arts.  This year she won research fellowships from CELSA-La Sorbonne and the Chateaubriand Commission, both of which have allowed her to spend the year researching and writing in Paris. Her interests center around the persuasive function of popular culture during times of war, particularly the ways that cultural products offer resources for the fashioning of alternate gender, racial, and ethnic identities.