Ethnomusicology and world music

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

People like me listen to world music to hope for and imagine a world without imperialism. I’ve sampled Central African pygmy music in my own work, and while I do a better job of attributing my sources than Deep Forest does, I’m motivated by the same impulse.

Timothy Brennan attributes the popularity of African diasporic music among white people to our unconscious desire to resist imperial capitalism. The same is true of world music.

More than just expanding tastes, world music characterizes a longing in metropolitan centers of Europe and North America for what is not Europe or North America… It represents a flight from the Euro-self at the very moment of that self’s suffocating hegemony, as though people were driven away by the image stalking them in the mirror (Brennan 2001, 46).

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