Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction

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. Keywords: DiasporaHistoryRepresentationMulticulturalismCalibrationHyphenated IdentitiesOthernessCultural DisplayInterculturalismPost-EthnicityPostcolonialismCarnival Performances Acknowledgements I wish to express thanks to Mine Dogantan, co-organizer of the one-day British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference (November 2005) and to Middlesex University for hosting the conference. Thanks are also due to fellow members of the Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group with whom I discussed Ato Queyson's book in one of our reading sessions (January 2006), to participants at the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology for allowing me to test the application of calibration at this seminar (September 2006), and to Rachel Harris who kindly read through this volume before publication. Additional informationNotes on contributorsTina 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)