Space and place in world music production

Abstract

Space and place are central to understanding the conditions of world music production. This article examines how three world-music venues generate particular imaginaries, identities and expectations for those involved: performers, consumers and promoters. These venues form part of a city's nighttime economy and as such they are replete with and reenact the spatial-cultural dymanics of their location. Drawing on interview data and participant observation I show how live performances create new tensions between the global and the local, in part, through spatialized interactions among social actors, representations of world music, and constructions of place and identity through the venues themselves.