In the Blood:The Racializing Tones of Music Categorization

This article examines the categorization of world music and how vexed and contentious issues pertaining to ideas of difference are navigated within processes of production and consumption of world music. By drawing on a study of British world music, it highlights the ambivalence expressed towards ethno-cultural hybridity and the way that racialized pathologies can be challenged or created and reinforced. It explores ideas about musicality and cultural expression that underpin the musical preferences and cultural values of consumers, musicians and professionals as a manifestation of the cultural logic of differentiation. It highlights the ongoing difficulty of explaining social and cultural phenomena without recourse to the idea of race, in contexts shaped by antiracist and cosmopolitan ideals. By illustrating how world music categorization does not erase race or nation, but instead recontextualizes both, this article provides an helpful insight into the changing dynamics of race.