Bollywood Trajectories and Audibilities of Race in Greek Popular Song

Abstract

This chapter explores “Indoprepi” songs in postwar Greek musical production. Indoprepi is a genre comprising diverse forms of adaptation: In particular, tunes and songs from Bollywood films screened in Greek popular cinemas from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Through Tim Ingold’s concept of “wayfaring, " the author raises questions concerning the mobilities, disembodied trajectories, transmediality, circulation, appropriation, and popularity of musical objects, including the cartographies of transnational regimes of melodramatic affectivities made in sound/film. As a cosmopolitan and intertextual genre made of “copies” and mobile, intersecting musical fragments-effectively remapping Greek popular song in the Middle East and the global South-Indoprepi is a promising case study for re-thinking the racial question in mainstream epistemologies and sensibilities of Greekness in music as well as its public/national memory. In the light of recent adaptation theories coming from film and literary studies, the author takes Indoprepi as a point of departure for exploring theoretical issues around the ethnomusicological study of adaptation, referentiality, and translatability, including their attendant desires, politics, and pleasures. © 2022 Taylor & Francis.