ABSTRACT
Government policies as encompassing as those for regulating Uzbek estrada habitually provoke the use of binary frameworks such as affirmation-opposition or repression-resistance in music studies. This chapter problematises these approaches, reveals them to be unsuitable for understanding administration in practice and proposes an alternative model instead. It starts by critically reflecting on what the author terms the ‘expectation of opposition’ in music studies. She shows this expectation not only to pertain to the choice of colleagues’ research topics, but also, and more importantly, to extend to the attitudes and actions of musicians, producers and audience in an authoritarian or totalitarian state. Shedding the assumption of a given antagonism between artist and state, a fundamental tenet in the ‘expectation of opposition’, she also discards the opposite, an ‘expectation of affirmation’. Instead, drawing, among others, on the work of Alexei Yurchak, the author moves beyond binary models and proposes a more fluid and flexible approach to estrada administration in practice, in order to discover what she posits as normal lives in music under authoritarianism
