Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction

Abstract

This article outlines some key issues in the study of musical performance in diasporic contexts and introduces the case studies in this volume. It explores contrasting approaches to ‘difference’ and representations of ‘otherness’ in the multicultural society to question the relevance of an ethnomusicological commitment to musical ethnicity in studying diasporic music-making. It points out some of the ways in which ethnomusicologists have negotiated the contradictions between asserting the historical specificities of diaspora and avoiding the rigidities of diasporic essentialisms. Queyson's notion of ‘calibration’ (concerned with the disjunctures between representations and social realities) is considered in relation to ethnographic details on Carnival performances in a museum space as a way of theorizing contradiction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 92 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.