The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Music Migration and Tourism

This book studies musical transformations in transit as they occur across time and space, exploring contemporary concerns about some of the impacts of globalization of musics and peoples as they transit across the globe. While taking diverse perspectives in embracing the contemporary musical landscape, the collection offers a range of research methods and theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, popular music studies, and media and cultural studies, thus providing interdisciplinary contributions to ethnomusicological studies of contemporary musical processes inspired by musical globalizations. Discussions on migration and diaspora advance discourse on new symbolic geographies mapped by the production, adaptation, and consumption of musics in transit. Elsewhere, essays on cultural travel and tourism raise concerns about the commodification of tradition and heritage, asking questions about cultural gain and loss, consumption, and performance. Tourism and migration are two key globalizing elements, and the book's combination of migration/diaspora and tourism allows for an exploration of the juxtaposition of phenomena like cosmopolitan empathy, advocacy, and responsibility versus the commodification of the other, capitalism, and inequality. While the contributions reach across disciplines, they are united by an ethnomusicological concern with local experience and new community formation. Departing from established theories (e.g. globalization), this book questions current conceptualizations of musical phenomena while focusing on sub-themes such as the post-national or the cosmopolitan imagination, which are recent and little explored additions to ethnomusicology's theoretical portfolio.