Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (review)

Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid fill a lacuna in ethnomusicology and migration studies in their edited volume devoted to postnational musical identities. As people regularly boast multiple homelands, native and adopted, however grudgingly or enthusiastically, their perceptions of home, native, local, and global morph in the throes of globalization. Corona and Madrid offer a collection of twelve essays that address the challenging topics of migration, transnationalism, and globalization through the lens of musical production and consumption in their recent collection aptly entitled Postnational Musical Identities. The volume represents a significant contribution not only to ethnomusicological studies (especially pop music), but more importantly to broader anthropological, political and even historical area studies.

A central argument in this work concerns globalization and its simultaneously productive and destructive qualities. Regardless of each author's position, all contributors concede that globalization signifies change and response to change especially in consideration of postnational identities developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, several contributors draw heavily on the theories of globalization as explored by Argentine anthropologist Néstor García Canclini, demonstrating his influence on Latin Americanist scholars. More importantly, these inclusions lend legitimacy to scholarship partially developed outside of Euro-centric schools of thought. Moreover, Postnational Musical Identities engages with the complexities of homeland, nostalgia, migration, and circular flows of information, revealing relevant interpretations of transnational and postnational identities.

Corona and Madrid begin the volume by defining postnationalism, describing it as "culture and the people who produce it, consume it, and identify with it continuously move through the borders of the nation-State via a wide range of technologies, [grouping] together in a variety of 'imagined communities'" (3). Migration, the decentralization of capital, unjust distribution of wealth in developing nations and changing citizenships are all products of globalization in a postnationalist era. The editors argue for the relevance of music scholarship in times of postnationality because of its embodiment of transnational issues. They state "music is always in constant flux, music is the perennial undocumented immigrant; it has always moved beyond borders without the required paperwork" (5). As such, music is an excellent tool to explore the projects symptomatic of postnationalism. Corona and Madrid believe that "musical meaning is found at the intersection of production, distribution, performance and consumption" (7) and their selections included within address facets of meaning within elements of production.

Following the introduction essay, Arved Ashby focuses on postnationalist perspectives in North American musicology, centering on what nationalism means to American citizens and how historically oriented musicologists textualize nationalism. Ashby articulates the (seemingly age-old) conflict between the ethnographic and the descriptive through his account of historicism and his (rhetorical?) question about whether or not "ethnomusicology and 'historical' (sic) musicology might inform each other most constructively" (32). Ashby concedes that there tends to be a simultaneous privileging of the present and colonizing of the past. "Historicism . . . is in fact a form of historical colonization: anyone desiring history's imprimatur can lay claim to the past as if it were a foreign country, turning the art of historical interpretation into an act of political legitimization" (33). Furthermore, he posits that music in our time isn't even postnationalist but rather neo-nationalist as the nation continues to exist but shifts (35). By and large, Ashby's discussion of musicology as a field supportive of colonialist projects is very relevant for the field today.

In Chapter 3, Barry Shank delimits a short period in musical history with his descriptions of what he labels as "productive orientalism." Shank describes commissions of a contemporary work in 1967 by the New York Philharmonic and the musical exchange that resulted between Japanese and North American composers during and after that time. Shank suggests that despite the blatantly orientalist nature of the commissions—that the Japanese composers including Toru Takemitsu include ethnic instrumentation to "represent Japan for western listeners" (46)—they...