Affective block and the musical racialisation of Romani sincerity

Abstract

This article analyses field research on tambura chordophone traditions among Croatian-, Serbian-, and Romani-Americans to consider diverse performers’ strategies of musical (in)sincerity. These strategies mobilise affective investments of musical labour alongside more directly conscious discursive constructions of ‘Slavs’ and ‘Gypsies’. Developing theories of intensity that distinguish affects from emotions via their gradations, it argues for the importance of null affect (a theoretical absolute zero), examining how musical jokes block affect before musicians draw into the proximities of racially Othered embodiments. In doing so, it demonstrates that musical affect is just as important in its negation and social regulation as in its abundance. The article proposes a synthesis of discourse-analytical and embodied-participatory methods that calls into question affect’s theorised ‘autonomy’ from referentiality. Analysing diverse tambura musicians’ limited capacities and desires to embody one another’s subjectivities musically (and to become them racially), it examines musical affect as a cultural resource, rather than essence, that like discourse is subject to blocking – to constraint and strategy – as much as to excess and abandon. Ethnographic attention to those affected more flatly by music as well as those whom it affects intensely thus illuminates the reciprocal impingements of discourses and feelings of Otherness.

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