29 - Musical antinomies of race and empire

Summary

This chapter offers a historical mapping of musical/racial alignments that have emerged in the context of the modern world system since the eighteenth century, with special focus on the social consequences of their various reformations in the new global networks over the past one hundred years. It outlines the historical trajectories of race that eventually established an American-centered idea of blackness as the key signifier of musical difference within popular world-music practices in Europe, Africa, and across the Americas. The chapter explores how the antinomies of inclusion/exclusion and black particularism/deracinated (white) universalism amplify and expand, as part of the global circulation of American popular culture after World War II. It demonstrates how the elevation of the status of public arts, together with the new economic and institutional commitments to popular culture among Western professional and managerial classes, has brought about a fundamental cultural shift across global metropolitan contexts.