ABSTRACT
The relationship between music, ethnicity and identity is nowhere as apparent as in popular and academic discussions of Bhangra including those in anthropology, sociology and studies of culture, religion, music and dance, in addition to the print and electronic media. Bhangra scholarship examines it largely in relation to the identity politics of South Asian diasporic formations in Britain, Canada and North America in which Bhangra becomes the site for the production and contestation of hybrid, in-between diasporic identities by second-and third-generation youth of Indian/South Asian origin. even though the euphoric declarations of ‘the Asian youth finding their voice’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s1 gradually gave way to wry cynicism in the unpacking of the new politics of ethnicity and identity in subsequent examinations of South Asian youth subcultures,2 Bhangra continues to be theorized through an ethnic lens even in more recent studies.3 With its heavy
investment in the politics of race, ethnicity, language, gender, caste, region and religion, it is not surprising that aesthetic or musical analysis of Bhangra texts has been marginalized to ideological considerations or the focus on uses and gratifications that is found in media and cultural studies. In this chapter I wish to investigate the production of Bhangra with the objective of examining the consolidation of ethnic identity in multicultural nations and societies in the wake of globalization and to focus on the benefits and dangers of the return of ethnicity in the identity discourses in the global village. The rhetoric of cultural difference in multiculturalism is seen as emerging from, and replicating, the older politics of race, colour, caste and religion in addition to building a new politics of ethnicity in which a mobilization of ethnicities fills us with multicultural hope but also makes us uncomfortable as participants in a neo-orientalizing world.
