Hybrid diaspora musics exceed center-periphery and origin-recovery models

Evidence

In the vernacular cosmopolitan exchanges that allow “Third” and “First” World popular musical traditions to fertilize one another, and which have constructed a symbolic space where so-called advanced electronic technology meets the so-called primitive rhythms—where Harlesden becomes Trench Town—there is no traceable origin left, except along a circuitous and discontinuous chain of connections. The proliferation and dissemination of new hybrid and syncretic musical forms can no longer be captured in the center/periphery model or based simply on some nostalgic and eroticized notion of the recovery of ancient rhythms. It is the story of the production of culture, of new and thoroughly modern diaspora musics—of course, drawing on the materials and forms of many fragmented musical traditions. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 848

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames vernacular cosmopolitanism and hybridity as concepts that break the center/periphery and nostalgia-for-roots models of cultural production.
• XREF: Connects directly to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the ‘new ethnicities’ argument Hall develops elsewhere; useful bridge for how ‘hybridity’ travels into Islamophobia-studies discussions of diasporic Muslim identities.