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| A Society and Its Journal: Stories of Hybridity |
| Stephen Blum |
| The Graduate Center, City University of New York |
| The lecture briefly reviews the history of the Society for Asian Music in relation to the history of musicology and ethnomusicology, one aim being to introduce the following roundtable on hybridity and postcoloniality. Reflecting on challenges to our work in research and teaching that we have encountered during the past half century leads readily from the first topic to the second. Some of those challenges have come from the efforts made in so many nations during the second half of the twentieth century to systematize and diffuse a cultural heritage. How does our work as scholars relate to those efforts, and to the larger issues of global inequality? Hybridity in performing arts is an inevitable result of the division of the world's population into haves and have-nots. As such it is an inescapable concern of musical scholars at the present time. |
| Through the 50 years of SAM's history, hybridity and related terms have been associated with particular types of narrative, several of which are well represented in the 40 volumes of Asian Music. Hybridity should not be regarded as the name of a research paradigm but as an enduring topic of myth, folklore and literature—a topic on which people’s anxieties, desires, and creative projects have long been focused. Scholars, no less than other humans, are spinners of tales who operate under certain sets of constraints and must choose from among the narrative strategies available to them, or devise new ones. What rhetorical moves do we see musicians, critics and scholars repeatedly making as they deploy terms like hybridity, fusion, and composite identity? This question is approached through discussion of examples from Iran, Caucasus, and Central Asia. [PDF] |
| Join us at our annual membership meeting! |
| Friday, November 20, 2009 | 12:30-1:30 PM |
| Revolución 1, Hotel Meliã Reforma |
| 09-Oct-2009 |