Critique of Exotica

John Hutnyk

Description

In this book, John Hutnyk questions the meaning of cultural hybridity. Using the growing popularity of Asian culture in the West as a case study, he looks at just who benefits from this intermingling of culture.



Focusing on music, race and politics, Hutnyk offers a cogently theorised critique of the culture industry. He looks at artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, FunDaMental and Apache Indian to see how their music is both produced and received. He analyses 'world' music festivals, racist policing and the power of corporate pop stars to market exotica across the globe. Throughout, Hutnyk provides a searing critique of a world that sells exotica as race relations and visibility as redress.
Alliances

1. Dub Introduction

2. Adorno At Womad

3. Dog Tribe

Appropriations

4. Magical Mystical Tourism

5. Authenticity Or Cultural Politics Internationalisms

6. Critique Of Postcolonial Marxisms

7. Naxalite

8. Conclusion

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• World of Music, Arts and Dance
• WOMAD
• Democracy
• Adorno

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849640770
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Critique of Exotica Music, Politics and the Culture Industry

John Hutnyk

Pluto

Press

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

Acknowledgementsiii

iv

Women’s Movements in International Perspective

First published 2000 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © John Hutnyk 2000

The right of John Hutnyk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hutnyk, John, 1961– Critique of exotica: music, politics, and the culture industry/John Hutnyk  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.  ISBN 0-7453-1554-2 (hardback) — ISBN 0-7453-1549-6 (pbk.) 1. Popular music—Social aspects. 2. Popular music—Political aspects. 3. Popular culture—History—20th century. 4. Asians—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Intercultural communication. 6. Hybridity (Social sciences) 7. Multiculturalism. I. Title. ML3918.P67 H88 2001 306.4’84—dc21  00-009745

ISBN ISBN

0 7453 1554 2 hardback 0 7453 1549 6 paperback

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Typeset from disk by Gilbert Composing Services, Leighton Buzzard Printed in the European Union by T.J. International, Padstow, England

Contents

Part I Alliances

1 2 3

Dub: Introduction Adorno at Womad ‘DogTribe’

Part II Appropriations

4 5

Magical Mystical Tourism Authenticity or Cultural Politics?

Part III Internationalisms

6 7 8

Critique of Postcolonial Marxisms ‘Naxalite’ Conclusion: The Culture Industry

Bibliography Index

Acknowledgementsv

3 19 50

87 114

141 180 211

239 251

Part I Alliances

Introduction 1

2

Critique of Exotica

1 Dub: Introduction

1 ‘Which do you prefer: Music or ham?’ (Erik Satie)

Introduction 3

Poetry or potatoes? Culture or politics? Dancing or meat? These are not just t-shirt slogans. Satie says a brutal choice must be offered just when the hors d’oeuvres arrive. He wants to upset bourgeois palates. ‘Music or ham?’ Asking neat, sharp and tasty questions like this raises issues of class, distinction and hierarchy while targeting polite society. An urgent economy slices through protocols of entertainment and opens onto a critique of ‘trade’ and of the commercial imperatives that drive the Culture Industry. Where frequency of representation cannot annul the complicity of critics, the self-declared impresarios of distraction, the purveyors of content, the advocates of lyrical and sonic seduction and the facilitators of fabulous ‘flavours of transnational capital’ (Banerjea 1998: 395), all owe a great deal to the multicultural trick that sells exotica as race relations and visibility as redress. For starters, scholarship, creativity and activism seem too often to drift apart and across a socio-political divide. This drift is never more present than in the conflicted triangle bounded by academic study, the cultural industries and political organisations. This book responds to questions about how in an ever more popular and well-publicised way, certain cultural forms – specifically exotic, ‘world’ or ‘South Asian’ inflected musical ones – become ‘flavour of the month’. Why? The ‘visibility’ of culture in ‘politics’ has become a crucial site for theory – not only within cultural studies, communications and anthropology, but more and more in the mainstream media and in debates generated among practitioners themselves. Perhaps it is time serious attention was paid to the intersections between and contradictory interests in the scene and beyond. As cultural product and cultural ‘flavour’ become the seasoning for transnational commerce,

3

4 Critique of Exotica

there are engagements with very high stakes that cannot be left to a politically naive academicism. Who discusses the new ‘visions’ of Asia in Britain which are then exported to the Americas and abroad? What returns from these exports? In 1998, with her new album released simultaneously across the globe, Madonna donned abindi for bad imitations ofbharatanatyam dance moves on a chart-topping video. Academic discussions of appropriation do not offer any moves towards a transformatory politics capable of a response to this. Nor does cultural cringe at the antics of George Harrison hippie reruns give us much, as starry-eyed minstrels Kula Shaker offered retro 1960s pop songs and travelogue returns to the magical mystery tour via MTV, the English football fraternity sang along to a tune that acknowledgedthenational dish as ‘vindaloo’. In this scene, articles by well-tenured ‘Marxists’ on ‘culture’ articulate only a mild disquiet and colonial and neo-colonial continuities are glossed as ‘postcolonial’, and so erased. Hybridity sells difference as the logic of multiplicity. Despite the effervescent cultural industries, the ‘hybrid’ visibility of Asian cultural forms has not yet translated into any significant socioeconomic redress of multi-racial exclusions within Fortress Europe. Granted we see the high profile of some ventures like2nd Generationmagazine, Asian Dub Foundation or the high street curry house, but the marketing of things Asian is more readily available to a well-resourced material girl than to South Asians themselves. It seems that the fashion forbindissitars is not a and guaranteed market option for the majority ofdesidiasporics even as it is they who have a large share in producing the cultural content of a refashioned multiculti Britain, exported as the latest ‘cool Britannia’ consumer product for the avaricious global culture-munching machine. There is clearly a need for a critical and political assessment of the possibility of a transnational cultural studies that would respond to this smorgasbord (platter or banquet). This would examine the tools and concepts we might use to ensure a more adequate understanding of cultural production than has hitherto been offered. This will be one of the major framings of this book, which is conceived in terms of a wider cultural politics that uses the various global incarnations of World and South Asian musics and appropriation as examples. But the slogan: ‘For a Transnational Cultural Studies?’, even with a possible qualifier: ‘the politics of hybridity and appropriation’, would not work as a depiction of what this book is trying to do as such a characterisation probably errs towards the too theoretical and general for what is contained here. Avoiding the reification of ‘transnational cultural studies’ as a singular category and at the same time offering a critique of that nascent ‘object’

Introduction 5

seemed critical. Then possibly the not wholly inappropriate ‘dub’ foundation metaphor might evoke an orientation much wider than the obvious reference to the music of the Asian Dub Foundation. This band is discussed in several chapters, and perhaps if some play could be made on ‘dub’ and ‘dubious’ as a general analogy (for cross-over, hybridity, layering, and for wider complications) some of the sense of this project’s convolutions could be conveyed. A critique of exotica, however, is my preferred overall description because this idea can be read several ways – as a critique of those who peddle exotica, as a critique of exotica itself, and as a critique of exotica as desire that we all, to some degree, fall for (hence my complicity as an employee of the disciplinary apparatus, training critical thinkers for future deployment in the culture industries or with the international agencies of exploitation – service work, infotainment, charities at best, the World Bank/IMF/UN just as likely). As to the specificity of Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) in the book as a whole – well, the band and the collective community music project are important as they are central to two chapters, in quite different ways (one on their UK work, one on West Bengal revolutionary politics), and these differences are necessary to the development of the argument and the politics I want to illustrate. Yet while ADF often travel easily outside the UK context (well-known in Europe, popular in the USA, stars in Japan, etc.), it is not onlytheir politics that I would celebrate as the potential site of valorisation in my version of a transnational cultural studies. Before ADF, Aki Nawaz and Dave Watts’ Fun^da^mental were, and are, front runners of a wider cultural ‘trend’ – however contested, even by themselves – and as with all things ‘Asian’ in the youth culture market at present, they have also been ‘flavour of the month’ in complicated ways. But having toured the US with Oasis, been nominated for the Mercury Prize and with three successful albums, ADF are perhaps more flavoursome now. Though much of this book centres around different and diverse musics not readily or easily ascribed under the problematic hold-all category ‘Asian’, cultural production such as that of Fun^da^mental, the very different fantasy Asia of Kula Shaker and the general heterogeneity that surrounds the world music circuit are the favoured ‘objects’ of this analysis. It is still useful however if the dubious ‘dub’ of ADF also enables a self-critique of my own involvement as a commentator/writer – something neither to be hidden nor overplayed. The critique of exotica must also examine the advent of my own interests and motivations. Of course it helps to like these sounds. From the start I have to tell you that I am notagainstcross-over, mixing, dub or whatever. The dubious critiques offered here are then compromised by

6 Critique of Exotica

2 my personal involvement in the to and fro of … well, of a white boy writing about black music and, as one report to a government agency 3 puts it, showing an ‘exclusive interest ... in the politics of the Left’. I am not the only one compromised in some way here of course. The preparation of content for the liberal multiculturalism of the cultural smorgasbord implicates both well meaning Third Worldists and livelihood-seeking Third Worlders. Good intentions caught within a sometimes quite restricted and apolitical horizon transmute into an advertising programme for international capital hegemony. Hybridity and cultural diversity become much more than a relativist abdication or rejection of Enlightenment progress, but rather the diminutive version of a dominant ideology that works better than ever through complexity. This is why renewed thinking on appropriation and transnational cultural production may be needed now. The call would be for a new theoretical approach to cultural politics and music designed to shift debates beyond celebrations or condemnations of ‘hybridity’ and fusion or cross-over. Thus the argument is that although hybridity and other such buzzwords of cultural theory are ‘dubious’, there are ways in which other political agendas can be read, or rather should be read, into the cultural work produced by so-called hybrid selves. Of course the double argument for and against hybridity would need to be signalled. As this critique of exotica is elaborated, each chapter of this book addresses some form of cultural politics in performance, music or video, whether this be the ‘hybridity-talk’ and exoticism of world music festivals (Womad) or the anti-Islamic reaction to Fun^da^mental in the context of their self-defence proselytising. The book includes a critique of appropriation as a dubious concept or category deployed by influential US writers on cultural creativity, and critiques of the appropriations made by the white left of exactly these ‘cultural’ contents in the interests of popular anti-racism. Along the way tele-technological factors impact upon cultural production as much as upon theorisations of diaspora and identity – and some may detect a Marxist criticism resident somewhere here too. The book is – likeRumourperhaps – about how well-meaning Other-love (anti-racism, esotericism, anthropology) can turn out to be its opposite, can be complicit at best, counter-productive at worst, part and parcel of the evil dynamic of capitalist exploitation, more often than not. The book is not ‘about’ culture, though possibly slips, here and there on purpose, into sentences that reify. It is not comprehensive, complete, an authoritative introduction to any bounded scene (some may find sections where the tone seems authoritative, but please try to leave

Introduction 7

McCarthyite gut reactions at the door). The book is not always prescriptive. In essaying a series of stops along the way, this book perhaps works best as a partial, historical and personal – biased, perspectival, interested – accounting of several years of research and activism. It is a documentary record of sorts, rethought across changes of place and time. Transformations lurk here, not least in the styles of writing. Why the record is worth keeping in view is, I think, that the task of thinking through (negotiating seems too judicial a term) the complicities and complexities of cultural politics (this term seems not judicial enough, these days anyway) is one that has to be made public or visible, however contingent. The complexity cannot be an excuse for avoiding analysis; it is its rationale. Complicity cannot be an excuse for 4 remaining mute; it is the condition of its expression. In the end, what I am looking for in approaches to cultural production is something like what Theodor Adorno called the ‘secret 5 omnipresence’ of resistance (Adorno 1991: 67). This can be seen as the possible inverse of that ‘visibility’ of culture which is not yet a sufficient politics. The argument is that more than visibility is required if co- option is not to be the beginning and end of cultural politics – visibility is a first and necessary move, a possible base, but upon this only a ‘transnational literacy’ (Spivak 1999: 357) that would trade visibility up into redress is adequate. I know that some friends will find this too much. I am thinking of Anamik Saha’s excellent discussion of the band Cornershop and their contribution, or Raminder Kaur’s sometimes more sympathetic line on Apache Indian (other takes on Apache Indian are 6 scattered throughout the text, my own view is guarded). However, in offering a critique of the ways well-meaningscholars, well-meaning exoticswell-meaning but under-organised and politicos all too often succumb to logics rather more violent than can be kept in focus, the task is to strive for a political literacy that disengages the metropole equivalent of the elite comprador restitution of colonisation that prevails today. (Either the capitalist roaders or the landlord class nationalists betray the promise of anti-colonialism, while in the ‘centre’ anti-racism is betrayed by performed illusions of equality and tolerant rhetoric which masks business-as-usual. Multiculturalism is the nomi- nated face of the latter. Post-colonialism the former.) A more focused question that breaks visibility into components might be to ask, in the context of diaspora, to what degree Birmingham remix maestro Bally Sagoo’s cultural pride and assertion of a strong Asian identity is premised on the sophisticated militant organising power of anti-racist and self-defence activism and its record in Britain? Here the