Made in Turkey by Gedik Ali C.;

Author:Gedik, Ali C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

A Global World Music Discourse?

From an academic viewpoint, efforts in the 1990s to examine world music led to the question of whether or not the phenomenon can be explored systemically (i.e., in relation to current global contexts) or if it should instead focus on specific case analyses. Veit Erlmann and Mark Slobin, respected experts whose world music research first paved the way for subsequent critical exploration, capture these perspectives well. Erlmann (1994, 166) references Fredric Jameson’s work regarding the production of difference (Jameson 1991) in likening the emergence of world music to the “aesthetic production of difference,” a concept informed by two particular aspects of global culture: “commodity production and the way in which differentiation is written into the very structural logic of late capitalism.”1

To put it another way, commodity production has married differentiation and homogenization that “now comfortably reside as members of the same family” (Erlmann, 1996, 473). Slobin (1992, 5), on the other hand, argues against “a hidden agency which controls the flow of culture in a global world.”2 In emphasizing instead the malleable boundaries that follow from deterritorialization in today’s globalized world, Slobin turns his attention to local project-analysis in which listeners and musicians alike create meaning, and form micromusical scenes, in global contexts. Whereas Slobin objects to the framing of world music as a direct representation of an overarching global system that overlooks local specificities, Erlmann contends that case analysis overemphasizes the local as a place of resistance in light of its relative autonomy. These distinct discourses have informed much of the existing world music literature.

On a related note, Feld (2000) proposes that world music perspectives can generally be considered either anxious or celebratory narratives. The earliest versions of the former were largely colored by cultural imperialism3: They investigated how indigenous and non-Western music had been exploited, packaged, and appropriated in the name of world music. In this vein, Tony Mitchell (1996, 1) explains that proponents of cultural imperialism emphasize Anglo-American industrial trade-routes as a source of cultural imperialism, which “displace and appropriate authentic representations of local and indigenous music into packaged commercial products commodified for ethnically indeterminate, but predominantly Anglocentric and Eurocentric, markets.”

Theoretically, however, many scholars have questioned cultural imperialism’s cursory explanation of the intricacies of the global system (i.e., power struggles and cultural evolution). Their skepticism is warranted given the perspective’s black-and-white representation of oppositions: Commodified and global versus authentic and local. Mitchell (ibid, 51) contends that the relationship between the so-called center and periphery is more nuanced, “always mediated by complex interplays of intercultural cross-fertilizations.” Martin Stokes (2012, 109) echoes this perspective, suggesting that cultural imperialism “assumes a simple causal linkage between technologies of sound production, musical styles … and a variety of political and aesthetic effects” although these associations are “complex and many-stranded.” Similarly, as Arjun Appadurai (1996) states, global forms, practices, and discourses are somehow indigenized in the “local,” a process that cannot be reduced to either/or propositions such as local/global or center/periphery.

Others have proposed more refined anxious narratives that speak to the power differential in world music’s production and consumption.

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