1st Edition

Musical Performance in the Diaspora

Edited By Tina K Ramnarine Copyright 2008
    168 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    168 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book illustrates how ethnographic investigation of musical performances might contribute to the analysis of diaspora. It embraces diverse examples such as 'mourning and cultures of survival' amongst Aboriginal and Jewish communities in Australia, remembering a Kazakh 'homeland' in Western Mongolia, celebrating Diwali in New Zealand and the circulation of musical performances in Mozambique, Portugal and the UK. Some of the topics discussed in Musical Performance in the Diaspora include:

    • the expression and shaping of diasporic and postcolonial identities through performance
    • musical memory in diasporic contexts
    • the geographies of performance
    • the politics of 'new' forms of diasporic music-making.

    This book presents a rich array of theoretical approaches and wide ranging ethnographic case studies to reconsider and challenge discourses that have favoured uncritical notions of diasporic 'hybridity' and to broaden current analyses of performance in the diaspora.

    1. Musical Performance in the Diaspora: introduction (Tina K. Ramnarine, RHUL)

    2. Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard: Musical Origins and the Doudou’s Colonial Pliant (Edwin Hill, UCLA graduate)

    3. ‘I take my dombra and sing to remember my homeland’: identity, landscape and music in Kazakh communities of Western Mongolia (Jennifer Post, Middlebury College, USA)

    4. "Happy Diwali!" Performance, multicultural soundscapes and intervention in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Henry Johnson, Otago University, New Zealand)

    5. Diasporic transpositions: indigenous and Jewish performances of mourning in twentieth-century Australia (Gay Breyley, Monash University, Australia)

    6. The Danza de las Cañas: Music, Theatre and Afroperuvian Modernity (Javier F León, University of Texas at Austin)

    Biography

    Tina K. Ramnarine