Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid, eds, Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), ISBN 978-0-7391-1821-4 (hb), 978-0-7391-1822-1 (pb)

摘要

Musicology does not want for titles that speak of the global order, of space, place, and identity, of the local and the national – but the postnational marks a relatively new departure. The editors seek not to herald the downfall of the nation, but instead to contest whether the boundaries of the nation are the most useful way to delimit an imagined audience or to understand the performance of identity through music. Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid's introductory chapter traces the growing importance of geographical markers in the production, distribution, and marketing of music, from the use of ‘world sounds’ in progressive music through the development of the marketing category ‘world music’ to the urban and global lounge. Corona and Madrid's work seeks to problematize attempts to ascribe a universal criterion of value and significance to such music. Music, they argue, is understood at the nexus of production, distribution, performance, and consumption. Their call for a careful contextualization of music emerges out of a strong belief that musical meaning arises out of contingent practices including performance, location, and sociocultural context. The postnational, they conclude, is an effective context for understanding music today, at a time when (as Martin Stokes suggested several years ago) ideas, cultures, and identities can no longer be unproblematically and securely held in place by the boundaries of the nation-state.1