In this section, I will look into the literature on globalization and culture, for these concepts are crucial to understanding and analyzing an intercultural creative project like the one at hand. I will start by defining globalization and cultural identity, moving on to the relation of the two. Then I will present some ideas of postcolonialism and different views on the effects of globalization. At the end of the chapter, I will apply these thoughts into the context of music with the example of the world music industry.
Globalization has changed the way cultural identities and cultural differences are perceived and constituted. The whole world is weaved in everything in life, from groceries shipped from all around the world to borderless social media. Globalization has become an everyday concept of our world where cultural identities are not tied to territory anymore (Punathambekar, 2017). A Finnish rock musician can get immersed in East-African retro-pop via YouTube and Spotify, and a Tanzanian rasta may watch American action movies from his iPhone before going to bed, to give a few examples. Global market, mobility, and later the world wide web have brought the countless distinct cultures in the world together and that has left us in an unexplainably pluralist, ambiguous, even a shaken state. Even though so much has relatively quickly changed and become global, the old ways of thinking about culture and identity, that derive from our past, territorialized world still have a huge impact on society (Appadurai, 1996, p. 27-29; Feld, 2000, p. 145). According to Stuart Hall, a Jamaican born English cultural theorist, cultural identity has been generated in a way like this:
”To be English is to know yourself in relation to the French, and the hot-blood Mediterraneans, and the passionate, traumatized Russian soul. You go round the entire globe: when you know what everybody else is, then you are what they are not. Identity is always, in that sense, a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative” (1997a, p.172).
This way of conceptualizing cultural differences is called cultural differentialism, and it is arguably the oldest way of understanding multiculturalism (Nederveen, 2004, p. 45). According to Hall, this kind of forming of cultural identity is justifiable no more because of globalization:
”The notion that identity in that sense could be told as two histories, one over here, one over there, never having spoken to one another, never having anything to do with one another, when translated from the psychoanalytic to the historical terrain, is simply not tenable any longer in an increasingly globalized world. It is just not tenable any longer” (1997b, p. 48).
For most of human history, cultural identity has been defined by the local: the surroundings, the local community, and, for the last millennium most importantly, the nation-state. Considering the relations of cultures of the world, one of the most influential cultural definitions like this is that of the Western culture, and how everyone else has been seen by the West. Manifesting in the world-shaping project of colonialization, the essentialism of what is it to be English, European, and Western formed the questionable foundation for global culture. Postcolonialism, an academic study of which Stuart Hall’s work is an example of, is the critical theory of this legacy of colonization and European cultural supremacy. Western culture has a vast tradition of creating knowledge about other cultures without the involvement of the voices of the actual representatives of the culture, broadly exposed in Edward W. Said’s postcolonial cornerstone book Orientalism, that presents how the West has constructed an unrealistic, exoticized impression and a whole academic field of study of the so-called Orient, which even as a concept is so broad it can refer to a variety of things from Arabic cultures to Japan (Said, 1978).
When it comes to the problem of Western ideological power and the underrepresentation of the voices of the postcolony, globalization can be perceived in different ways. As Simon Gikandi, a Kenyan Literature Professor and a postcolonial scholar puts it:
”...while we live in a world defined by cultural and economic flows across formally entrenched national boundaries, the world continues to be divided, in stark terms, between its ‘‘developed’’ and ‘‘underdeveloped’’ sectors. It is precisely because of the starkness of this division that the discourse of globalization seems to be perpetually caught between two competing narratives, one of celebration, the other of crisis” (2001, p. 628-629).
Globalization has been blamed to be Westernisation or Americanisation, (or even McDonaldization and Coca-Colonization, see Nederveen, 2004, p. 49) with a good reason. Afterall the Finnish rock musician exploring East-African music uses American devices and software developed by American companies to do it, as well as the rasta in Dar Es Salaam watching Hollywood action films before sleep. Appadurai elaborates this effect of homogenization to be not only about American culture taking over, but generally the bigger and the stronger similiarizing the smaller and the weaker, with the example of Japanization of South Korea (1996, p. 32). Similiar notion could be made in my experience about Bongo Flava, the current popular music in Tanzania, which is strongly influenced by the popular music of Nigeria. Appadurai also recognizes there is a heterogenisizing process going on at the same time: as the cultural influences are taken, usually from the dominant culture through media, they are indigenized and thus transformed into a new local variant of the original. Continuing the above-mentioned example Bongo Flava, it is easy to recognize the influences of Nigerian afrobeat, American hip hop and electronic dance music, and the old Tanzanian / Kenyan pop music. From these ingredients, it has become a genre and culture of its own, a Swahili modern.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a Dutch-born Professor of Global Studies and Sociology for the University of California, distinguishes three approaches to cultural difference and globalization.
1. Cultural differentialism, as mentioned above, the old way of thinking of lasting difference, cultural relativism, territorial culture, race thinking. Though cultural differentialism the future of human culture can be seen as ”A mosaic of immutably different cultures and civilizations”.
2. Cultural convergence, a view of universalism and modernization that implies that the world will grow to be more and more the same. According to this line of thought, globalization can be viewed critically as homogenization, Coca Colonization, or on the other hand modernization which will, arguably, develop all cultures of the world towards a universal best form of a modern society.
3. Cultural hybridization, which means that cultures are going through an ongoing process of mixing, which happens particularly fast in the age of globalization. This is the most recently developed way to understand cultural difference and globalization with its philosophical roots in the postmodern thinking. Cultural hybridization, or syncretism, will lead us into ”open-ended ongoing mixing” of cultures.
(2004, p. 55).
World music provides us with a great example of globalization and its different narratives. The music industry has since the 1960s established a steady concept of the genre ”world music”, a label that can be put on any music non-western. This labeling, which has worked very well for the music industry in creating an understandable product for the Western consumer, depicts well the above-mentioned cultural differentialism. This has brought up the issues of exoticization and fetishization that have made the concept of world music questionable and critiqued by many, especially ethnomusicologists.
The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld writes about ”anxious” and ”celebratory” narratives of world music in his essay A Sweet Lullaby for World Music. The anxious narratives see world music as a capitalist endeavor to turn cultural difference into profit, the original ”pure” form of culture into a product. Thus it is fair to ask if world music actually promotes cultural difference at all or just erases it in a homogenizing way (2000, p. 152). This resonates with Nederveen’s notion of cultural convergence. World music has also been criticized for its ethics: who is profiting from world fusion projects led by Western pop artists and how are things like copyright and ownership applied adequately when recordings of indigenous people’s music are made into products?
Feld’s insight on the celebratory narratives of world music resonate with cultural hybridity:
”In response, celebratory narratives counter these anxieties by stressing the reappropriation of Western pop, emphasizing fusion forms as rejections of bounded, fixed, or essentialized identities. That is, celebratory narratives of world music often focus on the production of hybrid musics. They place a positive emphasis on fluid identities, sometimes edging toward romantic equations of hybridity with overt resistance” (2000, p. 152).
Seen from this angle, the originality and pureness of the cultures are not so important as the possibility of creating new, hybrid forms of music that celebrate human creativity. Culture is always changing and redefining itself, and from this point of view globalization and world music brings new opportunities for music that will develop in directions that are impossible for us to foresee.