World music in the Balkans and the politics of (un)belonging (original) (raw)

2015, Beyond the East-West divide: Balkan music and its poles of attraction

The tropes of East and West in the discursive formations centered on ethnic and folk music have taken various historical forms, with the ever-changing and complex relation of Orientalism and Occidentalism qua Balkans. The contemporary discourses on world music in Serbia and in the wider space of shared popular culture of former Yugoslavia often rely on a rich elaboration of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ elements of musical style, tradition and history that serve as an important axiological and aesthetic point of reference. During the early phase of development of Serbian and regional world music/ethno scenes in the mid-nineties, the idea of ‘East’ vs. ‘West’ was frequently evoked in terms of musical sound, but also in the context of bringing out the histories and divergent strains of musical traditions in the process of redefining the ethnoscapes (Appadurai), with a resulting conceptual tapestry of intertwined ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ features that is by no means univocal. Certain strains of world music (loose) network of the Balkans exemplify how the binary East – West is being debated, negotiated or even deconstructed and, moreover, how a strategically non-essentialist, but at the same time ‘thick’ identification and sense of belonging is being created and offered as an alternative to more conservative or exclusive concepts of ethnic cultural identities in the region. This can be observed in the revival of musical traditions and genres that historically did rely on the blending of Eastern (Oriental) features and local musical styles. Revivals and newly formed fusion scenes like Bosnian nova sevdalinka (new sevdalinka song), Serbian vranjska pesma (the song of Vranje), or the cultural events like Belgrade’s Ethno Fusion fest with a proclaimed tendency to draw parallels between Balkan and South Mediterranean musical heritage, all share a common trait or at least an important structural homology: namely, a goal to differently inscribe common poles of triad Eastern – Western – local and to remove the whole debate from the essentialist discourses that often dominate the public sphere of former Yugoslavian nation-states. The very idea of the “bridge between East and West”, therefore, takes a different (political) form, where the musicians as social actors refuse to be caught in the imago of the Big Other, but instead propose a different, dislocated reading of a common cultural habitus, in favor of a possible, newly-imagined Balkans.