Kelly Jakes

Popular Music and Resistance in Occupied France, 1940-1944

My dissertation argues that popular music was vital to the project of resistance in Occupied France from 1940-1944 because it offered myriad opportunities for the reclamation of individual and national identity. Whether appropriating old WWI drinking songs or humming the melodies of “disreputable” jazz refrains, citizens mined the terrain of popular music in search of symbols that would help them imagine themselves in ways that subverted Nazi and Vichy constructs of national belonging, race, and gender and out of which they could mark themselves as guardians of a virile French republicanism, as fierce protectors of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Kelly Jakes is a Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most broadly, her research focuses on the themes of popular culture, identity, and resistance. Employing theories and methods from the fields of rhetoric, performance studies, history, and musicology, she strives for a deeply interdisciplinary approach to the study of textual, musical, and embodied discourses. Her work has been supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship for research in the humanities, a competitive, national grant awarded by the French government.