A Note from the Editor

Diaspora 3:3 1994 A Note from the Editor Three decades ago, "diaspora" was a term of self-description for a few communities—Jewish, Armenian, and Greek—and barely an operating concept in history and some of the social sciences. Today, the term and the semantic domain in which it functions—diaspora, transnationalism, ethnicity , exile—is repeatedly appropriated by various disciplinary (and polemical ) endeavors, and redefined along the way. Part of the task of Diaspora , the journal, is to collocate andjuxtapose new disciplinary adaptations of its "master-concepts." In the ethnomusicology section of this issue, Guest Editor Mark Slobin introduces readers to the ways in which ethnomusicology has found it necessary to adapt and transform this terminological and conceptual domain as it deals with music(s) whose importance to collective identity—of nations, ethnicities, diasporas—is matched by its transnational mobility and responsiveness to hybridizing efforts. Himself a leading scholar of the ethnomusicological study of diasporas and subcultures, Professor Slobin has brought together a group of essays that deal with a variety of materials, ranging from Haitian to Chinese, but which are joined by a methodological concern for multifocal and multilocal cultural productions that I believe readers will find instructive. —Khachig Tölölyan ...