In This Issue

Diaspora 3:3 1994 A Special Section on Diasporic Music: Slobin's introduction and the four essays that follow it together constitute a special section of this issue, devoted to diasporic and transnational research in ethnomusicology. In a richly compact survey , Slobin points to the perspectives that ethnomusicology brings to bear on the construction ofindividual and collective identities. He marks the shift in his discipline from the privileging of traditional indigenous music to studies that point to a paradoxical combination of"the volatility ofthe musical components" ofdiasporic music and the "power of cohesion" that this particular cultural form makes possible, sometimes also enabling unexpected intercultural affiliations . Averill argues that "the Haitian music industry and its circulation of expressive commodities has been transnational^ organized from its inception." He shows how, since the 1960s, Haitian bands have provided core events around which diasporan communities gathered for important collective rituals. Sometimes nostalgic and at other times political and directly engaged with the realities ofthe homeland, Haitian music has helped to fashion "dyaspora" and to reconcile homeland and overseas populations. Zheng explores the effects of "global cultural compression" by focusing on the music culture ofNew York City's Chinese diaspora. Her richly detailed account addresses available models for global cultural flow by Appadurai, Gupta and Ferguson, Sheffer, and others , showing that in the Chinese case, the triangular homelanddiaspora -hostland model is complicated by such consequential factors as the aspirations ofindividual musicians, transnational music brokers, and the role ofmusic patronage in the strategic thinking of Taiwan's government. This account ofthe declining impact ofphysical dislocation and cultural displacement in the era of transnationalism poses yet another challenge to the adequacy ofassimilationist models based on the experience of earlier white ethnic and diasporan communities. Velez's claim "that not all diasporan musics are diasporan in the same way" is developed in her study of Milton Cardona. Born in Puerto Rico, this New York musician is an adherent ??Santería who puts together bands made up of professional performers and amateur coreligionists. These multiethnic bands, made up ofCaribbean, Diaspora 3:3 1994 African-American, and occasionally white performers, play in diverse secular contexts a religious music that has been claimed as national-folkloric (Cuban/AfroCuban) and as African diasporan, raising questions of true homeland and authenticity. Vêlez shows that this musical culture variously fulfills criteria attributed to "subcultural ," "diasporic," and "affinity intercultures" or, indeed, to the "borderland," which need not straddle frontiers but can be understood as any heterogeneous site ofcontact between multilingual cultures . Hammarlund challenges the assumption that homogeneous homeland music exists and is simply transported into an immigrant enclave in the hostland by exploring the career of a Turkish musician in Sweden who is a migrant rather than immigrant, and oscillates between goegraphical and cultural zones that include four relevant musical subfields. The music he creates, Hammarlund argues, embodies not synthesis but syncretism, whose musical arrangements correspond in important ways to social realities and enable him to assume a new role in Swedish society. Other Articles: Danforth examines the emergence of a transnational political and identitarian conflict. The dispute between the Greek state and the ethnic group of Slavic Macedonians living in northern Greece, once a minoritarian struggle and an internal affair, has been transformed . Danforth shows how it has expanded to involve Bulgaria, Serbia, the post-Yugoslavian "Republic of Macedonia," whose very name Greece persists in rejecting, and diasporan activists from the Macedonian region, both of Slavic and Greek origin. Because the Slavic Macedonian diaspora has ably recruited support in Canada and Australia, and has been able to take the case to international bodies, a local conflict has been globalized. Danforth argues that globalization, far from leading to homogeneity and the end of nationalism , has led to the transnationalization of struggles over nationhood . Mankekar's essay is both a review ofKaren I. Leonard's study of a multiethnic Punjabi-Mexican-American community in California and a revision and extension of the idea of a politics of location that has emerged in the past decade. Drawing on the data of Leonard's richly textured book and on her own study of dislocation in India, as well as on Roger Rouse's concept of "cultural...