Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West

Rating:
Summary: Very, very dense
Review: I see the earlier reviewer's point about the book's being impenetrable. However, this leads me to believe that the reader read the first 80 pages and gave up. This is a tragedy, as the first 80 pages, while incredibly complex and filled with references to numerous thinkers, is resolved and made clear throughout the rest of the book.

To better explain, Erlmann views the 20th Century's globalization as more a continuation of trends in the 19th Century. Additionally, he discusses the communication and mutual dependence that Europe and its Others had with one another - indeed their very identities were defined through one another.

The first part of his book uses the tours of two African choirs to England and the US respectively to illustrate his views on 19th century colonialism, and then turns to Ladysmith Black Mambazo's involvement in Paul Simon's Graceland and beyond for Part II to illustrate the continuities. When he reaches Part II, a number of the complex, seemingly imprenetrable thoughts of Part I come into focus; it is brilliant scholarship, but requires patience.

That said, I would only suggest this book to people who are studying South African music - it's probably a bit too dense for anyone thinking of reading it for interest or pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Very, very dense
Review: I see the earlier reviewer's point about the book's being impenetrable. However, this leads me to believe that the reader read the first 80 pages and gave up. This is a tragedy, as the first 80 pages, while incredibly complex and filled with references to numerous thinkers, is resolved and made clear throughout the rest of the book.

To better explain, Erlmann views the 20th Century's globalization as more a continuation of trends in the 19th Century. Additionally, he discusses the communication and mutual dependence that Europe and its Others had with one another - indeed their very identities were defined through one another.

The first part of his book uses the tours of two African choirs to England and the US respectively to illustrate his views on 19th century colonialism, and then turns to Ladysmith Black Mambazo's involvement in Paul Simon's Graceland and beyond for Part II to illustrate the continuities. When he reaches Part II, a number of the complex, seemingly imprenetrable thoughts of Part I come into focus; it is brilliant scholarship, but requires patience.

That said, I would only suggest this book to people who are studying South African music - it's probably a bit too dense for anyone thinking of reading it for interest or pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Trendy jargon galore
Review: In what he describes as a "topography of global culture," Erlmann attempts to discet the global fictions of modern statehood, national identity, history, subjectivity, the arts etc. showing how they are not representations of fixed realities, or one sided determinations but rather processes that take form and develop through what he calls the global imagination, "the means by which people shift the contexts of their knowledge and endow phenomena with significance beyond their immediate realm of personal experience." The book examines how cross cultural interaction between different senses of modernity over the past 100 years have shaped the constitutive categories of race, class and gender. The book ultimately argues that the cultural topography of a "world that is now truly one" is based on the interdependency of people the world over. Erlmann explores the workings of this global imagination through two examples of interaction between South Africa, England, and the United States. The first of these is a tour of two African chiors in the 1890s, and the second is the work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo after 1986. Erlmann does not attempt a historical or narrative continuity between or within the two examples, but rather examines aspects of each as texts within their specific political and historical context. The author gets at the complexities of each example from many angles, examining the significance of biography, dance, composition, politics, religion etc. The diversity of focus makes the book read somewhat like a collection of articles, but Earlmann speaks authoritatively on every page. The value I find in the book is how assumptions of race, identity and authenticity (among others) are examined in context of global interaction and change with a result that is much more vialbe than many essentialist ideas of the colonial encounter and African/ African American music. Erlmann also gives emphasis to agency, a focus that is denied in too many other works in contemporary theory. The book is written for the academic audience, but should find wide interest outside of Antropology and Ethnomusicology.

Rating:
Summary: Give this book a chance!!!
Review: Quite simply, I feel compelled to write a review of this book because of the rather harsh slandering it received from the previous critic. I agree that there are many academic books out there that are ultimately filled with nothing but trendy, pretentious jargon, a mere jumble of mixed and incoherent messages. To throw this book into that category means the reader simply hasn't taken the time to decipher or just doesn't understand the rather complex, and in my opinion, extremely well-thought out and important arguments made in this book. Sometimes books can be tough reading; this one deserves your patience!
I can sum up the main argument in a few sentences: globalization is typically seen as a rupture with the past, as a fundamentally new process. Authors like Arjun Appadurai tend to link this process with the rise of electronic media, which has the ability to create new kinds of communities. Erlmann, on the other hand, sees globalization as more of a continuation of the 19th-century than a fundamental break with the past. He thinks that to understand the complex layers of signification which occur in the 'global imagination' today (such as in world music), one must ultimately return to an examination of the colonial period, especially to Enlightenment thought and the constructions of identity within European culture at that time - constructions which ultimately depended on the colonizing experience itself. Thus, in my view, it is rather ingenious that the first half of the book focuses on the tours of two 19th-century African choirs, and the second half of the book on Paul Simon's Graceland - he demonstrates for us the continuity of ideas born in the modernist era (the concept of the panorama, the Great Exhibitions, biography, travel writing) with what the world music movement of the 1980s. But he does far more than just claim Paul Simon is resuscitating the same old, colonialist predicament - he examines in much detail the history of isicathamiya, and displays how the Graceland album both does and does not mark a change from its traditional performance practice (for example, isicathamiya is seen as a genre that thrives on throwing otherwise disparate messages and lyrical images together to create new meaning, and the song 'Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes' continues that tradition, when Ladysmith Black Mambazo's views of womanhood are juxtaposed next to Paul Simon's). The upshot: this book should be required reading for ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and those interested in post-colonial studies and globalization.

Rating:
Summary: Trendy jargon galore
Review: This is a fascinating topic and some useful data is provided, but that is all. Surprisingly, this book was given quite an appropriate review in the journal, Ethnomusicology. Its style is an example of what is wrong with academic writing today. Unfortunately, the publishing establishment tends not to notice that such books are intentionally written so as to be inpenetrable to readers. Academics write this way to avoid criticism. Since nobody can tell what exactly they mean, nobody can challenge them or prove them wrong on any points. Some readers feign complete understanding of such books in order not to seem ignorant. Presses should not exascerbate the problem further by printing such things.