Editors’ Note: Culture Industries and African Diaspora

From afrobeat to zouk, Afrodiasporic musical traditions have become foundational in the practices of culture worldwide. The commodification and consumption of these sounds as well as attendant movement practices, fashion styles, and a variety of other items are complexly entangled with, even central to, local, national, and international circuits of culture and capital. Such prominence, placement, and recognition suggest a dramatic shift: peoples who were literally commodified to provide forced labor for building industries, economies, and nation-states (Gilroy 1993; Winant 2001) have emerged as key participants in all aspects of the producing, selling, and buying of (and other) commodities. Yet the transition from forced to free labor force, from human commodity to consumer, and even from (enslaved) laborer to capitalist is not without numerous tensions and contradictions. As argued by Paul Gilroy, for example, the uncritical participation of many black people in global economies risks rendering them complicit with subjugating racialized discourses that were at the heart of the slave trade, Western industrialization, and, indeed, modernity (2010). Clearly questions remain as black music goes global: What is the price of any related newfound economic freedoms? On the other hand, what new opportunities emerge even in the face of such costs? These concerns, along with the many related discontents and, importantly, possibilities, underlie the various contributions to this special issue of Black Music Research Journal. The articles comprising the volume emerge from a symposium held in 2010 at York University's Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples in Toronto, Canada. Junior and senior scholars from fields such as African-American studies, ethnomusicology, literary criticism, dance history, and communications studies presented new research and discussed the processes, politics, and transformations contributing to and resulting from the commodification of various types of Afrodiasporic expressive culture in a variety of contexts. Included here are extensively reworked versions of five of the papers initially presented. Each article in its own way addresses longstanding concerns among scholars (e.g., Miege 1989; Frith 1992; Ohmann 1996; Negus 1999; Hesmondhalgh 2007; and many others) who have queried various aspects of the cultural industries and thus expanded Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's foundational ([1944] 1997) critique of the culture industry--the mechanisms and dangers related to the industrialization and massification of music and other forms. Building on this body of scholarship, contributors to this issue endeavor to achieve even more nuanced understandings of how musical practices--and especially the people participating in them as producers and consumers--interrelate with economic interests and commodities both in Africa and its diaspora. Yet each author endeavors not to reduce expressive practice or their engagement with to economic matters. Indeed, in various ways, all of the studies suggest how, far from becoming mere fetishes, commodified musical practices can and do remain important sites for various uses and meanings that include but extend well beyond economic or other kinds of exchange. For example, Steven Pond's article addresses a common concern for scholars of Afrodiasporic music: authenticity, which he queries in relation to displacement, embodiment, and circulation through the most common formulation of African diaspora--out of Africa and into other parts of the world. His specific point of engagement is the deeply problematic notion of (see Hobsbawm 1983) in the context of the institutionalized teaching of Ewe drumming and dancing both in Ghana and in the United States. What constitutes a tradition when it has long existed in multiple forms, themselves not separate from various types of exchange, that enter into multiple regional, national, and international circuits of mediation and exchange via embodied performances and pedagogies? …

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