World music and the search for difference

World music has been immersed in a series of complex ethical, political and aesthetic debates since its emergence as a new musical category in the 1980s. These debates have been fuelled by competing perspectives that portray world music as either an exemplar of progressive cosmopolitan politics that foster cultural hybridity or as reinforcing fixed and unitary conceptions of difference through an essentializing representation of cultures.

By utilizing interviews with key people involved in the organization of world music in Britain, this article centralizes this tension by examining the role of difference in world music. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural intermediary is used here as a descriptive label for the work of those involved in this research and as an explanatory tool to highlight how difference defines the interaction between the substantive and symbolic processes within the British world music scene.

This article argues that the work of cultural intermediaries demonstrates the ambivalent cultural processes within the performance, management and consumption of world music. This is evident in the series of recursive shifts within world music that employ a model of difference that draws on both the binary logic of traditional meanings of race/ethnicity and hybridity. In so doing, this article also examines how world music affinity and consumption, which takes people across arbitrarily ascribed boundaries, challenges the idea that normative racialized identities are meant to provide a fixed set of cultural values, musical tastes and social attitudes.