Transcultural Sound Practices

British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation

Carla J. Maier

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501349577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

Part One

Towards a Cultural Analysis of Sound Practices

1

Renegotiating Culture in the Age of British Asian Dance Music

This study investigates the juxtaposition of South Asian sounds and urban dance music in the UK as a diverse cultural practice in which the local effects of globalized communication, transnational migration and musical production are negotiated, and examines how these local practices of music production and perception affect and transform discourses of cultural formation.¹ In order to create new ways of thinking about cultural formation in this fast-changing, highly dynamic world, this chapter seeks to critically revise received concepts of culture which are based on territorialized identities, and questions nationality and ethnicity as a primary frame of reference for cultural identification. The chapter argues that the specific musical practices which generate transcultural urban musical styles such as UK bhangra or British Asian electronic music also constantly reconfigure the conditions of cultural and discursive formation, and that, consequently, the focus of analysis should be on the concrete practices of production, perception, and dissemination of these musics.² In order to specify my conception of transcultural South Asian dance music, one important trajectory is the understanding of the significant relation of music and diasporic culture. This was pertinently expressed by Virinder S. Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk in Diaspora and Hybridity in their statement:

The intermingling, interpenetration and blending of cultural traditions, in what Dick Hebdige (1987) called, borrowing from black musical culture, the ‘cut‘n’mix’ of contemporary culture, enables the production of hybrid, syncretic and creolized forms […] Yet, unlike those anthropological approaches which have marked this process as a re-creation of tradition or a reproduction of social forms in a new place, Stuart Hall maintains that these innovations of culture are not and never can be simple re-creations because they are the product of new material conditions. (Kalra et al. 2005: 37)

The authors refer to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic for an exemplification of this significant interrelation of music and diasporic cultural production:

Music is the vehicle that ‘brings Africa, America, Europe and the Caribbean seamlessly together. It was produced in Britain by the children of Caribbean and African settlers from the raw materials supplied by Black Chicago but filtered through Kingstonian sensibility’ (Gilroy 1991: 5). This kind of patterning can be repeated in many other contexts as well as with other forms of cultural production. What is specific about Gilroy’s stance on musical expression is the relationship forged between expressions of resistance and expressive forms. In a similar manner the routes marked by the musicians in the Bands Asian Dub Foundation and Fun^da^mental produce a different diasporic space, one that takes in South Asia, the Middle East, England and North Africa but shares a common tradition of resistance through cultural praxis with those musicians described by Gilroy. This is a music that finds its material rooted in the inner-city areas of London and Birmingham, yet nevertheless draws its inspiration from a multi-locational, multi-musical set of sources and, of course, is consumed globally. (Kalra et al. 2005: 38)

Considering the presence of South Asian cultural productions in contemporary UK, one finds equally significant productions of literature, theatre or visual arts which are all part of the transcultural fabric of the UK.³ Moreover, as will be shown, this fabric renders old dichotomies of tradition and modernity, East and West, heritage and innovation questionable.

One of the main ramifications of cultural globalization is the decreasing importance of the nation-state as primary reference for cultural formation (Appadurai 1996, Beck 1998, 2009). Cultural theories that relied on a singular grand narrative of European modernity conceived of nations as fixed and homogeneous entities with their own unique, firmly attached cultures. However, more recent perspectives developed in cultural, literary and postcolonial studies (Bhaba 1994, Schulze-Engler 2004, 2006, 2009), as well as sociology and anthropology (Clifford 1988, 1992, 1997, Gupta and Ferguson 1992, Featherstone 1995, Urry 2000), have started to investigate the complexity of the relationship of the nation and the global frameworks of cultural formation and have shifted the focus onto ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘entangled histories’ (Chakrabarty 2000, Welz 2004, 2009). In the former Eurocentric model, a notion of Western culture was established which included the nation states of the northern hemisphere (particularly Europe and the United States) and was defined in opposition to all other cultures, which more or less included the nations of the southern hemisphere. However, the complex political, economic and cultural constellations of colonialism, imperialism and postcolonial migration clearly transcend the limits of fixed nation states. Against the backdrop of the transnational trade of goods (and enslaved people) during the colonial era, the various politically and/or economically motivated migration processes which took place during the decolonization process, as well as the contemporary forms of mobility and exchange, created multiple ‘transnational connections’ (Gilroy 1993, Hannerz 1996, Ong 1999) and fostered ideas about a new social, cultural and political world order (Giddens 1999, Castells 2000, Hardt and Negri 2000, Mignolo 2000).

There has therefore been a growing awareness that people, consumer goods and ideas are not fixed to one place, nation or community, but that they are in a ‘flow’, and that cultural formations are fundamentally influenced by these dynamic and multidirectional movements. Thus, the spatial parameters have changed. Popular music can serve as a particularly pertinent example of the ‘poetics and politics of place’, as George Lipsitz compellingly argues in his book Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place:

Popular music has a peculiar relationship to the poetics and politics of place. Recorded music travels from place to place, transcending physical and temporal barriers. It alters our understanding of the local and the immediate, making it possible for us to experience close contact with cultures from far away. Yet precisely because music travels, it also augments our appreciation of place. Commercial popular music demonstrates and dramatizes contrasts between places by calling attention to how people from different places create culture in different ways. A poetics of place permeates popular music, shaping significantly its contexts of production, dissemination, and reception. (Lipsitz 1994: 3–4)

Lipsitz suggests that the production, uses and circulation of popular music play a significant role in the negotiation of place – and thus of power relations and constructions of cultural identity. Music transcends national boundaries and follows various transnational trajectories:

Like other forms of contemporary mass communication, popular music simultaneously undermines and reinforces our sense of place. Music that originally emerged from concrete historical experiences in places with clearly identifiable geographic boundaries now circulates as an interchangeable commodity marketed to consumers all over the globe. Recordings by indigenous Australians entertain audiences in North America. Jamaican music secures spectacular sales in Germany and Japan. Rap music from inner-city ghettos in the U.S.A. attracts the allegiance of teenagers from Amsterdam to Auckland. Juke boxes and elaborate ‘sound systems’ in Colombia employ dance music from West Africa as the constitutive element of a dynamic local subculture, while Congolese entertainers draw upon Cuban traditions for the core vocabulary of their popular music. (Lipsitz 1994: 4)

Lipsitz makes a valuable point here in emphasizing the multiple musical linkages that propose a more multilayered conception of culture. In this respect, transculturality means that people are not constricted by either the one or the other culture. However, this quotation still exhibits a fixation on the contemporariness of musical exchange which could imply that globalization is a new phenomenon which presupposes a past in which culture was still ordered along ‘clearly identifiable geographic boundaries’ (Lipsitz 1994: 4). I would argue that there is no before and after globalization, but that it is rather the discourses about globalization, global communication and diasporic cultural formation which have only recently been explored more thoroughly. Furthermore, the means of communication and global exchange have surely changed considerably with the development of digital media technologies, and it is on these new forms of circulation and use that analyses have started to focus. The aspect which is core to the sort of analysis upon which this study concentrates is that the specific musical connections are worth investigating with regard to the specific spatial, temporary and transcultural entanglements. In contrast to a number of critics who have been apprehensive of the growing influence of Americanization on popular music and thus homogenization of global popular culture, Lipsitz and others have argued that rather than leading to a homogenized space inhabited by a global culture, global developments have significant impacts on local places and significantly reconstitute local music culture. It is therefore argued here that transculturality is the result of the discontinuities and cultural entanglements that happen against the grain of a linear history and across national boundaries and identities.

In order to relate these thoughts to the context of post-war Britain, Britain’s attachment to the concept of the nation has to be critically examined, as it still has an impact on how questions of ethnicity and cultural identity are discussed in both political and pop-cultural debates. As Benedict Anderson already claimed in his well-known 1983 book, nations are Imagined Communities, and nationalities can be conceived as cultural artefacts which are based on ‘multiple significations’ that change according to specific historical, social and cultural conditions (Anderson 1991: 4). Ashley Dawson problematizes the way in which the nation has continuously been defined as an exclusivist concept, in the context of the UK. In Mongrel Nation, he claims that Britain’s adhesion to the framework of the nation has often been analysed as a reaction to the ubiquity of globalization processes and an ensuing insecurity and loss of control; Britain’s reluctance to become part of the EU could also be attributed to this. Dawson remarks, however, that the zeal for a distinctively ‘British’ culture was grounded in Britain’s experience of losing its standing as an imperialist power:

Long after Britain lost its colonies it retained its insular sense of cultural superiority. Indeed, the more potency they lost on the global stage after the eclipse of imperialism, the harder some Britons clung to the illusionary status symbol that covered their bodies – their white skin – and the immutable cultural difference that it seemed to signify. (Dawson 2007: 6)

Dawson argues that ‘[t]hese ideologies of difference and innate superiority’ helped to create ‘enduringly exclusionary discourses of national identity’ that have formed, and continue to form an integral part of British political and cultural life (Dawson 2007: 6–7).

One example for how this was accomplished is the way in which, in the mid- to late 1990s, Tony Blair’s New Labour party aimed at constructing a new image for modern Britain. In fact, the outcome was an exclusivist cultural politics. The tendency of commodifying the ‘other’ is reflected in practices such as the designation of chicken tikka masala as ‘a true British national dish’ (Cook 2001).⁴ These ventures should also be regarded as deliberate strategies in New Labour’s project to aggregate the threatening ‘other’ into a manageable ‘we’ while maintaining an alluringly exotic twist.⁵ At the same time, there has been a tendency to deny, or neglect, the impact of South Asian diasporic cultural production on British popular culture and discourses.⁶ Referring to a more recent example, Dawson analyses the British government’s responses to the July 2007 bombings, which in his view ‘germinated from the deeply racialised manner in which British identity has been framed for the last half-century’ and concludes:

[T]he policies pursued by the Labour government are driven by a cultural racism that hinges on the defence of putatively homogeneous national values against an alien threat. This is […] an institutional and ideological racism that is grounded in exclusionary discourses of national identity disseminated across the political spectrum and deeply inscribed in British culture. (Dawson 2007: 176, original emphasis)

Consequently, the racialized discourses of national identity continue to have an impact especially on postcolonial post-migrant communities, i.e. the successive generations of Caribbean, African and Asian migrants living in Britain.

Particularly with regard to complex migration processes, people develop multiple linkages across the confines of nation states. Following Nina Glick-Schiller’s notion of transmigrants, migration practices can no longer be seen as one-way processes in which people leave their culture of heritage behind and subsequently enter the culture of the host country. She argues that ‘[c]ontemporary immigrants cannot be characterised as “uprooted”’ as they ‘maintain multiple linkages to their homeland’ (Glick-Schiller 1995: 48). The notion of transmigrants that is established by Glick-Schiller proves particularly useful to differentiate the various motivations (economic, political, etc.), practices (transnational kinship relations and social networks) and effects (financial support of the family in the homeland) of migration in the contemporary world (Glick-Schiller 1995: 48).

Investigating the particularities of diasporic cultural production, Dawson criticizes the effects of Britain’s essentialist cultural politics and illustrates how, as expressed in both literature and music, ‘[d]iasporic communities in Britain denaturalised the confining boundaries of the nation-state’ and therefore profoundly challenged Britain’s ‘insular sense of cultural superiority’:

[B]y enacting fresh ways of being British, members of the postcolonial diaspora helped to reconfigure social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality that cemented conventional definitions of national identity. Although many white Britons found the novel cultural practices of postcolonial migrants profoundly threatening, the newness introduced to Britain by members of the Asian and African diaspora also offered important routes of escape for many from stultifying local traditions. (Dawson 2007: 7)⁷

Dawson argues that diasporic cultural practices do not only have considerable ramifications for the lives of individuals, but that these practices reconfigure the cultural, social and ideological condition of British society as a whole. He thus explores the critical interventions of bands such as Fun-Da-Mental and Asian Dub Foundation into public discourses of post-9/11 and post-7/7 racism and Islamophobia:

The anti-imperialist cultural politics of engaged artists such as Fun-Da-Mental and Asian Dub Foundation point toward a radically different and truly postimperial Britain […] The stinging criticism such groups offer of Britain’s imperial legacy makes them part of the chorus of voices that have sought over the last five decades to decolonize Britain and, in so doing, to make of it a truly mongrel nation. (Dawson 2007: 188)

While Dawson relevantly points out how diasporic writers, scholars, artists and musicians have profoundly transformed and continue to transform the British cultural and social landscape, in the above quote, the limitation of his overall concept of ‘mongrel nation’ becomes apparent: it reproduces a kind of methodological nationalism. Although Dawson adequately observes how the notion of the nation is insufficient in capturing the creative and conflicting dynamics of contemporary cultural production, the category itself, albeit contested, remains intact as the fundamental reference point in Dawson’s methodology.

A work which is particularly compelling in its attempt to transgress the conceptual confines of nationality is Ali, Kalra and Sayyid’s collected volume A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain in which they implement the term ‘BrAsian’ to deconstruct the dichotomy of Britishness versus Asianness. Sayyid claims in the introduction that there was a continuous effort in the past to maintain a ‘colonial framing of ethnically marked populations,’ which was, according to the author, ‘most vividly demonstrated by the chequered trajectory of the various labels deployed to identify people from South Asia who settled in Britain in the wake of the (formal) decolonisation of British India: Black, British Asian, Asian British etc.’ (Sayyid 2006: 4). In opposition to this stance, the editors set out to employ a different, more productive, term to write a book about South Asians who settled in Britain, and one which might also not tie them to the ‘postcolonial condition’:

[T]here is an obvious problem as postcolonial marks something beyond colonialism but not something intrinsic in itself, in other words, the ‘post’ in the postcolonial reminds us that we have not arrived at something that can have its own name. (Sayyid 2006: 5)

Therefore, the term BrAsian is suggested in order to speak about people in Britain with a South Asian heritage so as to express ‘the need for a category that points one in a direction away from established accounts of national identities and ethnicised minorities’ (Sayyid 2006: 5). On the one hand, BrAsian is used to differentiate ‘British’ Asians from people associated with Asia outside of the British context (where Asian often refers to people of East Asian or South East Asian heritage). On the other hand, BrAsian implies a deconstruction of Britishness, a term Sayyid deems particularly problematic due to its inextricable bond with the era of the British Empire. Sayyid argues that ‘such a transformation of Britishness cannot be accomplished without the dis-articulation of coloniality in its constitution’ (Sayyid 2006: 6).

Particularly significant in the context of the present study will be how an exclusivist notion of ethnicity has to be critically revised with regard to South Asian–influenced dance music. In one of the contributions to A Postcolonial People, Sanjay Sharma applies the term BrAsian to South Asian music from the UK. He argues that writing about BrAsian popular music ‘is like charting a map without legitimate borders and boundaries’, a picture which he sees further complicated by the nowadays ‘customary […] claim that all modern music is syncretic or hybrid’ (Sharma 2006: 317). To come to terms with the highly diverse range of BrAsian popular music, the central characteristic marker seems to be its detachment from a cultural or ethnic ‘origin’:

What is common to this music is not simply the ethnic marker of ‘Asian’, rather its concomitant articulation of ‘roots’ (identity, belonging, place) and ‘routes’ (cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalftitlePage
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Towards a Cultural Analysis of Sound Practices
• Part Two Listening to British Asian Dance Music
• Part Three Thinking Sound as Cultural Transformation
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint