Diaspora is one of the most ancient and most modern concepts of music's relation to time and space, to history and cultural geography. Diaspora situates music, musicians, and musical culture in places distinguished by placelessness, on musical landscapes different and apart from places of origin.
2. Diaspora in the historical imagination.
5. Diaspora, modernity and postmodernity.
PHILIP V. BOHLMAN
The displacement of diasporic music cultures results primarily from two conditions. First, a group may have been forcibly expelled from a place of origin, often a place claimed for sacred or providential reasons; the classic case of this condition of dispersion is the Jewish diaspora. Second, a group may have no place of origin, hence the necessity to move across cultural landscapes belonging to others; the classic case is that of Roma and Sinti peoples, those cultures subsumed under the pejorative rubric, gypsy.
In diaspora, music contributes to the construction of identity in contrastive ways, shoring up the representation of self and negotiating interaction with otherness. Metaphors of Jewish music history, for example, have stressed the possibility of retaining the music culture prior to the expulsion of Jews from Palestine in 70 ce. In contrast, Roma music is falsely imagined to have no identity, but rather to assume the identity of any place Roma people inhabit.
There are four fundamental configurations of history and, accordingly, of music history that diaspora produces. First, myth or sacred journey ascribes a unique temporal framework to the group itself, whereby music stems from a time before history. The diasporic journey provides the historical path from one sacred world to another, passing through a sacred and temporally bounded world. The music of sacred journey emerges from and represents myth. The diasporic Beni Hilal of North Africa maintain musical traditions that represent their journey in this way (Slyomovics, 1987). The repertories of the Hindu Rāmāyana and Mahābhārata pass themselves along sacred journey in South and South-east Asia, while absorbing metaphors of wandering. Second, diaspora also assumes the forms of secular history, often because a diasporic group's journeys provide them with no place to settle. Certain regions engender histories of journey, for example between different lands along the Mediterranean (Magrini, 1993). Diasporic history stems from responses to overpopulation or political repression, as in the emigrations to North and South America from the 17th century to the 20th (Todorov, 1984; Greenblatt, 1991). Third, conquest and colonialism are intentional forms of diaspora, whereby one group consciously imposes its culture on others, often with music as an active agent. The Age of Discovery produced numerous forms of colonial diaspora whose sacred forms are evident in missionary hymnody and the spread of musical instruments, such as the harmonium. Utopian communities, such as Mormons and the Amish, are versions of such diaspora. Fourth, transnationalism is the modern and postmodern historical framework for diaspora. Musical repertories and music cultures spread beyond political and national borders. Musicians themselves may form communities engaged in diaspora, for example blues musicians in North America (Baker, 1984), African popular musicians along Atlantic coastal regions (Gilroy, 1993), or the mendicant Bauls in Bengali-speaking areas of South Asia (Capwell, 1986).
Western concepts of diaspora have traditionally derived from three models, each with a distinctive relation to the dialectic between myth and history. More than any other conceptual model, the Jewish diaspora relies primarily on mythical functions of music (Baer, 1936; Sachar, 1985). The metaphysics of Jewish music may even depend on the concept of diaspora, for example in the often hostile rejection of instrumental music until the return to Israel and the coming of the Messiah.
In the early modern era, the African diaspora provides a powerful historical trope (Lemelle and Kelley, 1994). African musical elements undergo diasporic displacement (Waterman, 1952), and African musicians engage in patterns of exchange across an Atlantic defined by African peoples (Harris, 1982; Gilroy, 1993). Music provides complex forms of historical evidence for the African diaspora, not only because of the spread of instruments, such as the banjo and xylophone, but also because of musical texts of transnational African religious movements, such as Rastafarianism and its music, reggae, and so-called Yoruba religions in South America. Within the larger African diaspora, local and regional music histories unfold through the dispersion of musical genres, such as the blues in the great southern-to-northern migration in the USA (Grossman, 1989). Historically, music in the African diaspora has suggested numerous links between the myths of African communal structures, of which dance and rhythm are parts, and the modern production and reproduction of global popular musics (Coplan, 1994).
At the end of the 20th century, massive shifts of global migration spawned new diasporas. Indian music, especially Hindustani classical and popular music, connects many communities of the South Asian diaspora, whether in the UK, North America, Trinidad, South Africa or Fiji (Myers, 1998). Competing nationalisms in eastern Europe or the Middle East, moreover, unleashed new diasporas, which realized their historical transformations with invention or reinvention of musical traditions, such as qasida in Bosnia or arabesk in Turkey (Stokes, 1994).
Music frequently provides a language for mapping out temporal and geographical spaces because music can represent the past in the present. The geography of a diasporic music can be both ancient and modern. Musical repertories in 20th-century Jewish anthologies, notably A.Z. Idelsohn's ten-volume Hebraïsch-orientalisches Melodienschatz (1914–32), were organized according to contemporary communities in the Jewish diaspora, all of which, however, stemmed from a common source, the music of ancient Israel. The music of the diaspora represented difference and divergence, but its historical trajectory was from unity back to unity. Similarly, Rastafarianism constructs a history of African diaspora, in which reggae functions as a transition from West African origins to East African (Ethiopian) consolidation. In these diasporas music symbolically constructs the historical path and return to origins.
Music in diaspora also retains traces of historical displacement. The spread of Hinduism in South-east Asia has left its imprint on musical systems even where it has largely been supplanted by other religions. Musical drama and ritual in Muslim Indonesia include Hindu myths, especially those associated with the Rāmāyana while also narrating the history of South Asian colonialism and trade in South-east Asia. The musical systems of South and South-east Asia differ from each other entirely, but they are connected by narratives of diaspora. The spread of Islam in the centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammed also remains evident in common musical elements undergirding the transmission of Islam's sacred texts, not least among them the Qur'an, which, in theory, is recited in the same way throughout the Islamic world. Although the complex conceptualization of music within Islam makes it impossible to specify common diasporic elements, these emerge at historical moments in which it is necessary to evoke unity, in other words, a sense of diaspora, such as in the consolidation of nationalism in Bosnia-Hercegovina or fundamentalist solidarity among Muslim nations of the Middle East and Central Asia.
Consolidation of musical styles seems to undo the divergence and diversity of diaspora, but it more often creates a network of cultural contacts and solidarity across widely dispersed communities. The emergence of the pan-Plains musical style among Amerindians dispersed by rapid westward expansion in 19th-century North America consolidated not only the common elements among pre-existing Plains peoples, but created new contexts to represent an identity that resisted the hegemonic domination of white North Americans, for example the Ghost Dance religion in the 19th century and powwows in the 20th century (Herzog, 1935).
Musical instruments often communicate the material and ideological aspects of diaspora, the ability to change and to resist change. Xylophone-type instruments with metal or wood slabs played in complex polyphonic patterns are found throughout the African diaspora, especially along the Atlantic coastal regions. The metallophone orchestras of mainland and insular South-east Asia also demonstrate extensive dissemination. Diasporic instruments may also symbolize the contestation of regional and national cultures. In South-east Asia, for example, silk-and-bamboo ensembles brought by Chinese colonizers, settlers and merchants co-exist with metellophone orchestras (e.g. in Indonesia and Singapore), while signifying a resistance to acculturation. Instruments have a special ideological power in the diaspora of Celtic culture along the western coast of Europe, from Galicia in Spain to Scotland. Bagpipes and harps provide physical evidence for a culture of resistance to, and through, modern nationalism, that is, against the political hegemony of Spain, France and England. Bagpipes and harps, despite their long history of dispersion throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, consolidate a musical language for modern Celticness that has the power of an international ideological lingua franca (Chapman, 1994).
Diaspora dialectically opposes processes of musical change that are characterized by extended preservation and radical alterations. Musical change, furthermore, results from the disjunctures that these dialectical juxtapositions produce, whether in a mythical world of unbroken wandering or in a postmodern world of forceful and sometimes violent displacement (Clifford, 1992). In mythological diaspora it is oral traditions that metaphysically protects music from change, though oral transmission is itself the primary cause of musical change (Tworuschka, 1991). Music for utopian and religious diasporas, such as that of the Amish, situate music between written and oral traditions in order to engender processes of remembering that rely on the propensity to forget; each time an Amish hymn is sung, it performs the history of the 16th-century European martyrdom in the re-mythologized world of modern North America. The sacred repertories of Islam, not least among them the Qur'an, are particularly powerful in their performative juxtaposition of oral and written traditions that connect the timeless past to the time-bound present (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1990). Sacred journey also juxtaposes stability and change, using music as a metaphor that distances a religious group from disjuncture and therefore ensures its cohesiveness. Musical repertories as different as those practised by East Asian Buddhists (Banzai, 1973) and European Christian pilgrims (Eade and Sallnow, 1991) represent sacred journeys for those participants.
Diasporic musical traditions are invented to represent a group in flux (Klusen, 1969) or to use music as a means of bounding tradition in history (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Encounters between groups in diaspora may produce musical borders across exchange and adaptation, or they may unleash conflict that renders musical borders impermeable. In cases of exchange, new musical repertories and practices emerge, yielding processes of hybridization. In cases of conflict, music may underlie new forms of racism. The postmodern disjuncture of diaspora is most evident in the various forms of transnationalism. Music provides a language for cultural translation, and in mediated forms it is located beyond the borders of communities and cultures that create it. Diasporic musics also transgress those borders, resisting the nationalism that encumbers diaspora.
In the age of transnationalism that unfolded in the late 20th century, diaspora increasingly became a form of cultural, ethnic and national identity. The mass mediation of world musics not only transmitted diasporic musics throughout the world but also accelerated the ways they narrated the contestation of history and geography. On one hand, diaspora and diasporic music lent themselves to the definition of new nationalisms, for example Israel at mid-century and Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kurdistan at the end of the 20th century. The dispersion of musical instruments in eastern Europe (e.g. ‘Slovak’ bagpipes) symbolically challenged the nationalisms of modern Europe and raised questions about their survival in postmodern Europe. On the other hand, diaspora contested late 20th-century nationalism, representing cultural spaces beyond nationalism, for example the growing presence of Muslim peoples in central and western Europe, and the long history of Muslim presence in south-eastern Europe. Muslim diaspora in Europe, whether the sacred traditions of mosques or the popular-music programmes on Turkish-language television in European cities, conceptually redefine the contexts of Western music itself.
The counterpart to transnational musics in the diasporas at the end of the 20th century was sacred music, which was also employed in the struggle for new places in an international history and geography. At the end of the 20th century shared musical practices increasingly defined dispersed musical cultures; the sacred exhibited a very different presence in Muslim, African and South Asian diasporas, but it nonetheless provided a core around which identity could cohere. The sacred, therefore, differs from transnationalism as a motivation and language for diaspora, and it perpetuates the earliest forms assumed by diaspora. At the end of the 20th century there was no single form of diasporic music, but rather an increasingly complex and contested presence of music in the rapidly changing historical geography of postmodernity.
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