Musical Performance in the Diaspora

Tina K Ramnarine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317969556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction

Tina K. Ramnarine
Tina K. Ramnarine is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway University of London. She is author of Creating their own space: The development of an Indian-Caribbean musical tradition (University of West Indies Press, 2001), Ilmatar’s inspirations: Nationalism, globalization, and the changing soundscapes of Finnish folk music (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Beautiful cosmos: Performance and belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora (Pluto Press, in press).

‘Is a lie so big even history believe it.’ This is a line repeated twice in Goodbye Columbus, referring to the lie that ‘Columbus could die’. In this rapso, Brother Resistance sings about the continuing effects of the development of plantation economies, importation of labour forces from around the world and modification of insular ecosystems that have characterized the Caribbean since 1492. It is part of a huge song repertoire dealing with themes of diaspora and postcolonial politics and reflecting the Caribbean as a site of diasporic encounter.

Attention to human mobility has expanded traditional frames of reference, which study music in a specific cultural and geographic location. Diaspora has been highlighted in attempts to analyse musical performances in contemporary global processes and human migrations. Diaspora often articulates with historical sensibilities and postcolonial politics, offering perspectives on the legacies of empires, historiographies and modes of cultural representation. Diaspora, then, is something more than simply migration. A classical concern in diaspora studies has been the relationship between diasporic context and a homeland elsewhere, with displacement, transnationalism and nationalism appearing as central analytical tropes. Among the research methods ethnographers have developed to investigate diasporic networks are multi-sited fieldwork and virtual (Internet) searches. Today, conceptual understandings of ‘diaspora’ are becoming increasingly eclectic, with the term achieving greater applications in ways that risk overlooking memories of violence in the shaping of many diasporic sensibilities.

While diaspora has something to do with ‘history’ it is also about ‘newness’. Ethnographic research has encompassed both modes, from analysis of historical specificity, musical memory and the preservation of tradition to the musical creativities, new performance spaces and new musical sounds of diasporic practices. The former mode reminds us that diasporas are historically specific and that the past shapes a sense of diasporic identity while the latter prompts us to question the rigidities and essentialisms of ‘diasporic identity’. The politics of diasporic identities often articulate with the politics of national, postcolonial and/or minority identities, leading to fresh sets of specificity and rigidity in thinking about diaspora. As Eric Williams wrote in his famous formulation at the outset of postcolonial national sovereignty in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘There can be no Mother India . . . There can be no Mother Africa . . . There can be no Mother England . . . There can be no Mother China . . . There can be no Mother Syria or no Mother Lebanon . . . The only Mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago’ (1964, 279). If the contradictions between asserting specificity and avoiding rigidity make sense to ethnographers, how might we theorize the contradictions themselves?

One way of responding to this question is to plunge into the problematics of otherness. We can begin with diasporic groups becoming settled in new homelands in societies that often come to be described as ‘multicultural’. The multicultural society places the diasporic subject in a category of difference. Embedded in the ideology of the ‘multi’ is the contradiction of all living together, all different. Thus Agawu refers to multiculturalism in his essay, ‘Contesting difference’, to ask how one might decide (say an ethnomusicologist) if a culture is ‘sufficiently different’ for study, a judgement which must be made in relation to ‘a prior set of analytical acts’ since differences are ‘not simply there for the perceiving subject’ (2003, 232 3). It is instructive to bear in mind the contradiction of the ‘multi’ and Agawu’s point about the presumptions that shape ethnographic research when thinking about diasporic musical practice. In Slobin’s (2003) overview of the study of diaspora in ethnomusicology, we see the perpetuation of the model of ‘a society with a music’ that has been one of the discipline’s cornerstones. This model is tenacious, even as it becomes complicated when applied to music in contexts of migration, diasporas, multicultural societies and transnational circulations. Thus Slobin writes about ‘diasporic neighbourhoods’ (where cultural borders might still be contained within geographically defined parameters in a multicultural society) and cites Averill on Haitians in New York living in diaspora, ‘posed between cultures’ (1998, 146). More importantly, Slobin alerts the reader to how little has changed in ethnomusicological perception despite the emergence of diaspora discourse in this academic field in the 1990s. ‘Traditionally’, he notes, ‘we talked about immigrants, or minorities, or ethnic groups, and much effort went toward figuring out "acculturation"’ (2003, 285). If the more recent discourses on diaspora and diasporic cultural production in terms of ‘hybridity’ do not seem so far removed from earlier analytical formulations and ethnographic representations, Slobin rightly points out that the subtleties of diaspora discourse as being more than just about demographics have also been embraced by ethnomusicologists. Diasporas have been understood as non-uniform, historical and political formulations. As such, they encourage us to look beyond music and people on the move as merely complicating our cherished conceptual presumptions about music mapped onto geographies and societies. Diaspora as something more than a question of demographics challenges us to rethink some of our paradigms.

Identity, of course, provides a stumbling block to rather more radical reconceptualizations that might be fostered by the diasporic turn within ethnomusicology, for the people we work with also assert, celebrate and maintain ‘diasporic identities’. The diasporic subject is thus constructed as different from all sides. For the diasporic subject, questions of identity are inextricable from the past and from his/her relationship to a former homeland, whether or not that home is several times removed through generations. Where the diaspora has formed as the result of violent encounter in which the past has been ruptured, as has been the case in many colonial projects, a sense of diasporic identity has enabled the diasporic subject to feel connected to a precolonial history. Holding onto a sense of ‘the loss of not having had that loss to lose’ as the character Alford George does in the novel Salt (Earl Lovelace 1996, 256) plays a crucial role in adherence to specific identities and resurfaces in postcolonial projects. Music is central to these projects. Hall argues that difference matters and the challenge is to capture a ‘sense of difference which is not pure "otherness"’ (1996 [1990], 115). He refers to the discovery of ‘blackness’ and the legacies of ‘slavery’ in Jamaica of the 1970s, a discovery which:

could only be made through the impact on popular life of the post-colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of reggae—the metaphors, the figures or signifiers of a new construction of ‘Jamaicanness’. These signified a ‘new’ Africa of the New World, grounded in an ‘old’ Africa:—a spiritual journey of discovery that led, in the Caribbean, to an indigenous cultural revolution; this is Africa, as we might say, necessarily ‘deferred’—as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor.

(Hall 1996 [1990], 116)

Deferral alerts us that sometimes the point is not the extent to which the past can be reconstructed in the diaspora, but that its traces are felt at all. As Gilroy writes, ‘contemporary musical forms of the African diaspora work within an aesthetic and political framework which demands that they ceaselessly reconstruct their own histories, folding back on themselves time and again to celebrate and validate the simple, unassailable fact of their survival’ (1993, 37, emphasis added). While the diasporic subject’s desire to reclaim a past that extends into the precolonial era reinforces diasporic difference, the relocation of that same subject (often in former colonial Metropolitan centres) has also challenged notions of culture, particularly of national culture, as Gilroy (1987) has theorised extensively. Multicultural discourses (which embrace diasporic communities as a part of multicultural societies) also become implicated in the promotion of revisions to nationalist ones. But how successful are these revisions? Gilroy notes that diaspora ‘allows for a complex conception of sameness and for versions of solidarity that do not need to repress the differences within a dispersed group in order to maximize the differences between one ‘essential’ community and others’ (2000, 252). The essentialisms of both diaspora and multiculturalism raise problematic issues about ‘ethnicity’, a site of difference to which I shall return, but the distinctions between ‘difference’ articulated above reveal contrasting approaches to the politics of otherness.

Musical ‘Calibrations’

Drawing on my own ethnographic research on the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, I would like to offer a few thoughts on how history, difference, identity and multiculturalism are calibrated in musical performance and cultural display. From a steelband concert given in 1951 in a hall newly constructed in the tide of post-war optimism (the Royal Festival Hall) to contemporary post-Notting Hill Carnival celebrations as part of ‘Black History Month’ in the institutional setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum, contrasting interpretative moves regarding these performances lead us into different routes through the diasporic and multicultural maze. Previously, I have been exploring Carnival performance events in urban public spaces in thinking through a series of questions about the politics of ethnicity, multiculturalisms, and the ways in which minority and/or diasporic status are embedded in, challenge and transform national life (Ramnarine 2004a, in press). In re-reading some of these performances here I turn to Ato Queyson’s literary theory of reading for the social, drawing on the idea of ‘calibrations’ by way of testing its application to the analysis of musical performance in multicultural contexts and drawing attention to an ongoing ethnomusicological commitment to musical ethnicities.

Queyson relates an anecdote about a reading primer that was used in schools in Nigeria in the 1960s, and which was studied by Anthonia Kalu as a schoolchild. The primer featured the following lines:

This is a man.
This is a pan.
A man.
A pan.
A man and a pan.

In Trinidad and Tobago such a reading primer would not have caused any bafflement, for it might have been read as referring to the steelpan, a musical rather than a cooking instrument and, indeed, one dominated by male practitioners in the 1960s. But, for Kalu, the baffling question was why a man and a pan? Eventually Kalu suggested that the man and a pan had nothing to do with African general experience which would have placed women in cooking roles, but referenced the domestic arrangements of colonial households in which cooks were often male. As such, a seemingly ‘innocent’ reading primer becomes a tool for naturalizing colonial domination in the minds of children and leads them to forms of cultural comparison later on in life. The man and a pan anecdote is a good illustration of what is meant by calibrations as used by Ato Queyson, who calls for calibration as ‘a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society’ (2003, xi). While the term is used in engineering to refer to the processes of fine-tuning instruments, Queyson writes that he intends ‘calibration’ to mean ‘that situated procedure of attempting to wrest something from the aesthetic domain for the analysis and better understanding of the social’ (2003, xv). In this enterprise, he presents calibrated readings that confront us with issues of comparison, and with the disjunctures between social reality, representation and translation—themes with which ethnomusicologists are all too familiar as they correspond to much debated ethnographic problems highlighted in critiques about the production of ethnographic texts.

Given the profound debates over these issues within the ethnographic disciplines, why turn to this notion of calibration? What insights can it provide into diasporic musical practice, the politics of multiculturalism or questions about the ‘administering’ of musical ethnicities? One of the themes for the 2006 meeting of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology was ‘administering musical ethnicity—to whom, by whom, with what consequences?’ I thought there was something very interesting about the choice of verb in this theme. ‘Administering’ implies some kind of imposition or at least some process of enabling. Administering involves more than one actor—someone administering to someone else. It highlights agents and agency in the politics and performance of diaspora and in establishing power relations. Administering fits well with anthropological debates about the display of others in museum spaces, with the idea of cultural comparison and with state policies on multiculturalism. Contemporary diaspora discourse can also be understood in terms of ‘administering’, for ‘diaspora’ is a term that often seems to be presented as synonymous with ‘ethnic group’ or is defined in terms of ‘ethnicity’. Of course, in the anthropological sense of group construction and relationship (cf. Eriksen 1993) a diasporic group is an ethnic group. But there are confusions over ethnicity, which involve ‘race’ discourse and minority status (see Eriksen 1993, 4). Analysis of diasporas cannot be limited to these issues, even if they are pressing ones for various diasporas, including the Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. The confusions over diaspora and ethnicity nevertheless provide a good example of the possible applications of calibration, in the sense of conceptual fine-tuning. Is the turn to diaspora within academic debate simply another approach to ‘new’ ethnicities? More important than terminology and categorization, what appeals to me in the metaphor of calibration is the emphasis on things not fitting, on adjustments in the musical and social worlds, and on the contradictions between discourses. With calibration we do not necessarily reach a resolution. We are left with chipping away at pieces that do not match. In contrast to musical metaphors that highlight processes of flow, accommodation and harmony, calibration grates and therefore seems to reflect the social world (and academic debate) more truthfully. The metaphor of calibration leaves a space for confronting the discomforts of diaspora as it converges with racism, discrimination, violence and inequality.

Calibration is not about homologies between the aesthetic and the social. A significant dimension of a calibrated reading is that it highlights the disjunctures between representations and realities. Queyson notes the problem of this disjuncture as persisting in:

the difficulty in ascertaining the minimum requirements for a representation to be actually perceived as invoking a reality beyond it...we can gauge that what persists unanswered in many theories of [representation] is what it is that allows a spectator or reader to recognize something as representing something else when the representational nexus relies on forms of conceptual translation of phenomena of apparently startling incommensurability...in other words how do we psychologically grasp the representation as relevant to anything beyond it?

(Queyson 2003, xxiv)

This emphasis on representations being divorced from the realities beyond might be applied to models of the ‘multicultural society’, for models are representations, tools to make sense of the social world. Two contradictory models of the multicultural society are either to emphasize cultural exchanges resulting in various ‘fusions’ that characterize global cities like London or to foster a view of various cultural groupings maintaining distinct traditions. The former model contains an aspiration to inclusiveness but can also be linked to ideas about integration, homogeneity and the potential loss of cultural distinctiveness. The second model, by contrast, promotes ‘cultural diversity’ and a view of culturally separate groups inhabiting the same (usually urban) spaces. Both models rest on assumptions of difference. Both models invite cultural comparisons. In fact, much multicultural discourse favours the second model. As Lundberg, M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction
• 2. Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard: Musical Origins and the Doudou's Colonial Plaint
• 3. 'I Take My Dombra and Sing to Remember my Homeland': Identity, Landscape and Music in Kazakh Communities of Western Mongolia
• 4. 'Happy Diwali!' Performance, Multicultural Soundscapes and Intervention in Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 5. Diasporic Transpositions: Indigenous and Jewish Performances of Mourning in 20th-century Australia
• 6. The 'Danza de las Cañas': Music, Theatre and Afroperuvian Modernity
• Index