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Ethnomusicology Forum
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Music, National Identity and the Politics

of Location: Between the Global and
the Local
Barley Norton
a

Goldsmiths College, University of London

Available online: 03 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Barley Norton (2010): Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location:
Between the Global and the Local, Ethnomusicology Forum, 19:2, 268-269
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411911003714768

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268 Reviews

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Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the
Local
IAN BIDDLE & VANESSA KNIGHTS (Eds)
Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007
xvii
251 pp., ISBN 9-7807-5464-055-4 (60.00)
Academic interest in cultural globalisation may have reached a peak in the late
1990s, yet the issue continues to engage music scholars*as evidenced by the British
Forum for Ethnomusicology conference in 2009 on the theme of Music, Culture
and Globalisation at Liverpool John Moores University. This book, which developed
from a conference on Popular Music and National Identities held at Newcastle
University in 2000, argues for reinstating the national into critical discourse on
musical globalisation. The debates, and indeed the anxieties, concerning the role
and significance of nation-states in an increasingly globalised world are certainly not
new (see Stokes 2004). But this book makes both a theoretical and an ethnographic
contribution to understanding the complex interactions between the global, the
national and the local, and how the production, dissemination and reception of
popular musics are implicated in these interactions.
In the Introduction, National Popular Musics: Betwixt and Beyond the Local and
Global, Biddle and Knights make the case for critical engagement with the national
dimension in popular music studies. This is necessary, they argue, because of a
tendency in recent scholarship to neglect the national in favour of foregrounding the
local as a site of resistance to the homogenising forces of globalisation, a tendency
which they suggest involves an idealization of place (2). Drawing on Zizeks use of
the Hegelian notion of the vanishing mediator, Biddle and Knights argue for the
reintroduction of the national dimension in a productive and critical manner as
the missing middle term of the local/global syllogism in order to reconsider how
nation-states and social units like them might operate as, as it were, a mediator
of the two outer terms (2). In the Afterword to the volume by Richard Middleton,
this understanding of the national as a kind of vanishing mediator is elaborated
further and compared with Lacans theory of the four discourses. Notably,
however, such theorising of the national is not taken up by other contributors to
the volume.
The main body of the book consists of two parts. Part One, Positions, consists of
two theoretically-oriented chapters. In the first chapter, John OFlynn suggests that
national identities and the nation-state are bound up with notions of authenticity.
Arguing against the view that authenticity is a theoretically tainted and moribund
notion that no longer plays a part in the construction, deconstruction and
reconstruction of collective identities, he maintains that ideas of authenticity are
important for peoples understandings of music. Furthermore, OFlynn proposes a
transitional model of authenticity that aims to highlight how old, new and ironic
authenticities are involved in the negotiation of national identity (34), and he

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Ethnomusicology Forum

269

briefly illustrates how new forms of authenticity are at work in musical representations of Irishness and Irish national identity. In the second chapter, David Murphy
rehearses some familiar arguments concerning the discourse on world music with
reference to Afropop, particularly the music of Youssou NDour. One of Murphys
main conclusions is that Afropop is not simply a by-product of Western culture: it is
the product of African, national, ethnic and regional cultures, and it is given specific
meaning within these contexts (57). While it seems worthwhile to bring attention to
local and national meanings of African popular musics that have been marketed as
world music, unfortunately the reader does not gain a thorough understanding of the
range of meanings Afropop has acquired, because the article does not include much
detailed ethnographic information based on field research.
Part Two of the book, Locations, offers seven case studies on popular music artists
and scenes in different parts of the world. These studies focus on: the rai music of the
Barcelona-based band Chab Samir (Parvarti Nair); banda music of the Latino
community in Los Angeles (Helena Simonett); rap from the banlieues in France
marjan Alim
(Brian George); Uyghur popular song, especially some songs by O
(Joanne Smith); various types of Serbian popular music, including turbo folk
(Robert Hudson); the music and performances of the Brazilian singer Antonio
Nobrega (Robin Warner and Regina Nascimento); and the music of Those
Norwegians, a dance music band from the remote town of Troms in northern
Norway (Stan Hawkins). The first four chapters are concerned with what the editors
of the volume describe in the Introduction as compensatory nationalisms, a term
they use to refer to the array of alternative, fluid conceptualisations and configurations of nation and nationalism articulated by diasporas, minorities and marginalised
groups, often across the borders of nation-states (10). The final three studies
concentrate on how music figures in the construction (and deconstruction) of
nation-states and national identities in three very different cases. The chapters in Part
Two take diverse methodological approaches and there is a degree of unevenness in
their depth and scope. Taken as a whole, however, they make a persuasive case that
ideas of the national are vitally important for a wide range of popular musics.
In short, this book makes a stimulating contribution to the literature on popular
music and national identity, and it has much to offer ethnomusicologists interested in
globalisation theory and the politics of popular music.

Reference
Stokes, Martin. 2004. Music and the global order. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 4772.

BARLEY NORTON
Goldsmiths College, University of London
B.Norton@gold.ac.uk
# 2010, Barley Norton