Critical Review - Slobin

In his 1994 article/introductory essay, Mark Slobin describes the scholarly study of diaspora music as a study in which "no one has formulated a worldwide viewpoint", mostly due to ethnomusicologists' prevailing focus on "the indigenous and the ancient" as opposed to contemporary cultural-musical landscapes. Because the study of of diaspora music is becoming more and more prominent, Slobin suggests that one keep a number of frameworks in mind while thinking about the complexities of diaspora music. The activity of the superculture, the "overarching nation-state cultural system within which diasporan... live", is an entity that constantly interacts with diaspora groups via governmental control and dominant commercial interests, an entity that acts as a "gatekeeper for visibility and accessibility" for diaspora groups' musics. The networks of interculture, the "links that connect all nation-state systems", plays a large role in the shaping of diasporas via industrial "tentacles" that allow diaspora musics to be sought and presented internationally and via "ties of affinity", or the choosing of diasporic affiliation that doesn't necessarily connect to one's own heritage. Maybe most important of all is the flexibility of music-cultural definition, the dynamism of cultural music which should be viewed in terms of "the fluidity of local aesthetics as opposed to an earlier [anthropological] fixation on 'tradition' as a benchmark fro which to measure 'change'," that is to say, we ought to use an examination of the idiosyncrasies of specific diasporic groups to help us "define" a diaspora at a given time.



Question: if a diaspora's music exhibits a radical departure from "homeland" music (e.g. hip hop) yet the diaspora's music is still culturally unique to that group, is the group really diasporic (at the very least in terms of music)?