Diaspora
Volume 3, Number 3, Winter 1994
Articles:
A
Note from the Editor
Music
in Diaspora: The View from Euro-America
Mark Slobin
Slobin's
introduction and the four essays that follow it together constitute
a special section of this issue, devoted to diasporic and transnational
research in ethnomusicology.
In
a richly compact survey, Slobin points to the perspectives that ethnomusicology
brings to bear on the construction of individual and collective identities.
He marks the shift in his discipline from the privileging of traditional
indigenous music to studies that point to a paradoxical combination
of "the volatility of the musical components" of diasporic
music and the "power of cohesion" that this particular cultural
form makes possible, sometimes also enabling unexpected intercultural
affiliations.
"Mezanmi,
Kouman Nou Ye? My Friends, How Are You?": Musical Constructions
of the Haitian Transnation
Gage Averill
Averill
argues that "the Haitian music industry and its circulation of
expressive commodities has been transnationally organized from its
inception." He shows how, since the 1960s, Haitian bands have
provided core events around which diasporan communities gathered for
important collective rituals. Sometimes nostalgic and at other times
political and directly engaged with the realities of the homeland,
Haitian music has helped to fashion "dyaspora" and to reconcile
homeland and overseas populations.
Music
Making in Cultural Displacement: The Chinese-American Odyssey
Su Zheng
Zheng
explores the effects of "global cultural compression" by
focusing on the music culture of New York City's Chinese diaspora.
Her richly detailed account addresses available models for global
cultural flow by Appadurai, Gupta and Ferguson, Sheffer, and others,
showing that in the Chinese case, the triangular homeland diaspora-hostland
model is complicated by such consequential factors as the aspirations
of individual musicians, transnational music brokers, and the role
of music patronage in the strategic thinking of Taiwan's government.
This account of the declining impact of physical dislocation and cultural
displacement in the era of transnationalism poses yet another challenge
to the adequacy of assimilationist models based on the experience
of earlier white ethnic and diasporan communities.
Eya
Arnala: Overlapping Perspectives on a Santeria Group
Maria Teresa Velez
Velez's
claim "that not all diasporan musics are diasporan in the same
way" is developed in her study of Milton Cardona. Born in Puerto
Rico, this New York musician is an adherent of Santeria who puts together
bands made up of professional performers and amateur coreligionists.
These multiethnic bands, made up of Caribbean, African-American, and
occasionally white performers, play in diverse secular contexts a
religious music that has been claimed as national-folkloric (Cuban/Afro-Cuban)
and as African diasporan, raising questions of true homeland and authenticity.
Velez shows that this musical culture variously fulfills criteria
attributed to "subcultural," "diasporic," and
"affinity intercultures" or, indeed, to the "borderland,"
which need not straddle frontiers but can be understood as any heterogeneous
site of contact between multilingual cultures.
Migrancy
and Syncretism: A Turkish Musician in Stockholm
Anders Hammarlund
Hammarlund
challenges the assumption that homogeneous homeland music exists and
is simply transported into an immigrant enclave in the hostland by
exploring the career of a Turkish musician in Sweden who is a migrant
rather than immigrant, and oscillates between geographical and cultural
zones that include four relevant musical subfields. The music he creates,
Hammarlund argues, embodies not synthesis but syncretism, whose musical
arrangements correspond in important ways to social realities and
enable him to assume a new role in Swedish society.
National
Conflict in a Transnational World: Greeks and Macedonians at the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Loring M. Danforth
Danforth
examines the emergence of a transnational political and identitarian
conflict. The dispute between the Greek state and the ethnic group
of Slavic Macedonians living in northern Greece, once a minoritarian
struggle and an internal affair, has been transformed. Danforth shows
how it has expanded to involve Bulgaria, Serbia, the post-Yugoslavian
"Republic of Macedonia," whose very name Greece persists
in rejecting, and diasporan activists from the Macedonian region,
both of Slavic and Greek origin. Because the Slavic Macedonian diaspora
has ably recruited support in Canada and Australia, and has been able
to take the case to international bodies, a local conflict has been
globalized. Danforth argues that globalization, far from leading to
homogeneity and the end of nationalism, has led to the transnationalization
of struggles over nationhood.
Reflections
on Diasporic Identities: A Prolegomenon to an Analysis of Political
Bifocality
Purnima Mankekar
Mankekar's
essay is both a review of Karen I. Leonard's study of a multiethnic
Punjabi-Mexican-American community in California and a revision and
extension of the idea of a politics of location that has emerged in
the past decade. Drawing on the data of Leonard's richly textured
book and on her own study of dislocation in India, as well as on Roger
Rouse's concept of "cultural bifocality," Keya Ganguly's
work on the politics of memory and the construction of selfhood, and
Martin and Mohanty's interrogations of "home," Mankekar
argues for the need to subvert further the association of home, homeland,
and at-homeness, even as she points out new engagements and possible
coalitions between apparently discontinuous transnational locations.
