Description

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Joe Mulhall uncovers how music has shaped resistance movements across the globe, from Irish protest songs to Apartheid South Africa to the artists in Ukraine today.

While the global history of the dictatorships, oppression, racism and state violence over the last century is well known – the role that music played in people’s lives during these times is less understood.

This book is a collection of stories and hidden histories about how music provided light in the darkest of times over the past century. How it steeled souls and inspired resistance to oppression. Rebel Sounds will explore the horror of the Nazi regime, the Soviet Union’s oppression behind the Berlin Wall, authoritarian dictatorships in Brazil and Nigeria, institutionalised racism and police violence in America and South Africa, street violence in Britain, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and musical resistance in war-torn Ukraine.

This is a social history of the twentieth century but one that takes in the human impulse to create, share and enjoy the one thing that connects cultures and spans generations: music.

About the Author

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Dr Joe Mulhall is a researcher and historian of postwar and contemporary fascism and is currently Senior Researcher at Hope not Hate, the UK’s largest anti-fascism and anti-racism organisation. He has published extensively on the domestic and international far right including reports such as Rewriting History: Lying, Denying and Revising the Holocaust; The International Alternative Right: From Charlottesville to the Whitehouse and From Banners to Bullets: The International Identitarian Movement.

In 2020 he has two forthcoming academic books, British Fascist Traditions: Continuities in Interwar and Postwar Fascism and the co-authored The International Alternative Right: Fascism for the 20th Century?

He has given talks around the world on his research and written for a range of print media including the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent, and discussed his work on a range of broadcast media including the BBC News at Ten, Radio 4’s Today Program, Channel 4 News, ITV News, Sky News and the Christiane Amanpour Show on CNN. He also sits on the Board of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in the UK.