World Music, nation and postcolonialism

Abstract

Abstract While there has been a degree of discussion about World Music by musicologists and sociologists, the subject has long remained under-theorized. Most cultural theorists have confined their music interests to the pop end of the spectrum, and, more specifically, most music writing about marginalized ethnic communities has been about African-Caribbean rap (see, for example, Baker, 1993; Gilroy, 1995; Lipsitz, 1994). World Music sits in an impossible, postcolonial space that cannot be wholly mapped. In the postcolonial realm, World Music is inscribed as always-already marginal, but simultaneously this music category carries an implicit push for reinstatement at the centre which threatens to shatter the illusion of a monolithic West. So how is World Music constructed as a musical category, how is this determined by concepts of nationhood, and does the category merely pander to neoclonialist fantasies? What space does World Music provide for the subaltern to speak, and on whose terms? This article defines World Music, outlines the evolution of the category and links this evolution to other developments in the music industry. It then considers the ways in which World Music taxonomy informs concepts of nationhood and reinforces particular geographical frameworks, and also considers how the music has been appropriated in left/liberal discourse as a surrogate ‘high’ culture. The article sketches a possible psychoanalytic model for consumer dis/identification with world musicians. Finally, it draws analogies between the function of World Music as a structure and the museum system; applies postcolonial analytic discourse to the construct of World Music, and explores both the limitations and the radical possibilities that such a music category might introduce. As we were leaving the chapel later, the beating of a drum began on the far side of the mission. Another drum, then another began. The beat was slow. … The moon was almost full, lighting up the compound like a street lamp. … The seven dancers each held a drum under his left arm, beating the stretched monkey skin with the fingers of his right hand. Each man danced by himself, though he kept to the circle. … After a while one of the men would leave the circle and go into the hut. Another would shortly appear to replace him. ‘What's going on, Manolo?’ ‘Sex.’ (Schneebaum, 1988: 53) Perhaps on some quiet night the tremour of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremour vast faint: a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild — and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. (Conrad, 1973: 48)