Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

How are national identities constructed and articulated through music?
Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the
nation state has consistently demonstrated a determination to seek out
and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular
musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as
sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment,
from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular
culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in
the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The
book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural
nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical
articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national
identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to
have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural
identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with
reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within
broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the
self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of
Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Žižek.
Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies
through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or
obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions
of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between
Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of
traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in
Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in
French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and
Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the
ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic,
ambivalent and dissident articulations of national identity and musical
practices.