Critique Of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry

by John Hutnyk

Overview

In this innovative book, John Hutnyk questions the meaning of cultural hybridity. Using the growing popularity of Asian culture in the West as a case study, he looks at just who benefits from this intermingling of culture. Focusing on music, race and politics, Hutnyk offers a cogently theorised critique of the culture industry. He looks at artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, FunDaMental and Apache Indian to see how their music is both produced and received. He analyses ‘world’ music festivals, racist policing and the power of corporate pop stars to market exotica across the globe. Throughout, Hutnyk provides a searing critique of a world that sells exotica as race relations and visibility as redress.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745315546
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	11/20/2000
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.47(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Hutnyk is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the author of The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representations (1996) and co-editor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms (1996).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Dub: Introduction

'Which do you prefer: Music or ham?' (Erik Satie)

Poetry or potatoes? Culture or politics? Dancing or meat? These are not just t-shirt slogans. Satie says a brutal choice must be offered just when the hors d'oeuvres arrive. He wants to upset bourgeois palates. 'Music or ham?' Asking neat, sharp and tasty questions like this raises issues of class, distinction and hierarchy while targeting polite society. An urgent economy slices through protocols of entertainment and opens onto a critique of 'trade' and of the commercial imperatives that drive the Culture Industry. Where frequency of representation cannot annul the complicity of critics, the self-declared impresarios of distraction, the purveyors of content, the advocates of lyrical and sonic seduction and the facilitators of fabulous 'flavours of transnational capital' (Banerjea 1998: 395), all owe a great deal to the multicultural trick that sells exotica as race relations and visibility as redress.

For starters, scholarship, creativity and activism seem too often to drift apart and across a socio-political divide. This drift is never more present than in the conflicted triangle bounded by academic study, the cultural industries and political organisations. This book responds to questions about how in an ever more popular and well-publicised way, certain cultural forms – specifically exotic, 'world' or 'South Asian' inflected musical ones – become 'flavour of the month'. Why?

The 'visibility' of culture in 'politics' has become a crucial site for theory – not only within cultural studies, communications and anthropology, but more and more in the mainstream media and in debates generated among practitioners themselves. Perhaps it is time serious attention was paid to the intersections between and contradictory interests in the scene and beyond. As cultural product and cultural 'flavour' become the seasoning for transnational commerce, there are engagements with very high stakes that cannot be left to a politically naive academicism. Who discusses the new 'visions' of Asia in Britain which are then exported to the Americas and abroad? What returns from these exports? In 1998, with her new album released simultaneously across the globe, Madonna donned a bindi for bad imitations of bharatanatyam dance moves on a chart-topping video. Academic discussions of appropriation do not offer any moves towards a transformatory politics capable of a response to this. Nor does cultural cringe at the antics of George Harrison hippie reruns give us much, as starry-eyed minstrels Kula Shaker offered retro 1960s pop songs and travelogue returns to the magical mystery tour via MTV, the English football fraternity sang along to a tune that acknowledged the national dish as 'vindaloo'. In this scene, articles by well-tenured 'Marxists' on 'culture' articulate only a mild disquiet and colonial and neo-colonial continuities are glossed as 'postcolonial', and so erased. Hybridity sells difference as the logic of multiplicity. Despite the effervescent cultural industries, the 'hybrid' visibility of Asian cultural forms has not yet translated into any significant socioeconomic redress of multi-racial exclusions within Fortress Europe. Granted we see the high profile of some ventures like 2nd Generation magazine, Asian Dub Foundation or the high street curry house, but the marketing of things Asian is more readily available to a well-resourced material girl than to South Asians themselves. It seems that the fashion for bindis and sitars is not a guaranteed market option for the majority of desi diasporics even as it is they who have a large share in producing the cultural content of a refashioned multiculti Britain, exported as the latest 'cool Britannia' consumer product for the avaricious global culture-munching machine.

There is clearly a need for a critical and political assessment of the possibility of a transnational cultural studies that would respond to this smorgasbord (platter or banquet). This would examine the tools and concepts we might use to ensure a more adequate understanding of cultural production than has hitherto been offered. This will be one of the major framings of this book, which is conceived in terms of a wider cultural politics that uses the various global incarnations of World and South Asian musics and appropriation as examples. But the slogan: 'For a Transnational Cultural Studies?', even with a possible qualifier: 'the politics of hybridity and appropriation', would not work as a depiction of what this book is trying to do as such a characterisation probably errs towards the too theoretical and general for what is contained here. Avoiding the reification of 'transnational cultural studies' as a singular category and at the same time offering a critique of that nascent 'object' seemed critical. Then possibly the not wholly inappropriate 'dub' foundation metaphor might evoke an orientation much wider than the obvious reference to the music of the Asian Dub Foundation. This band is discussed in several chapters, and perhaps if some play could be made on 'dub' and 'dubious' as a general analogy (for cross-over, hybridity, layering, and for wider complications) some of the sense of this project's convolutions could be conveyed. A critique of exotica, however, is my preferred overall description because this idea can be read several ways as a critique of those who peddle exotica, as a critique of exotica itself, and as a critique of exotica as desire that we all, to some degree, fall for (hence my complicity as an employee of the disciplinary apparatus, training critical thinkers for future deployment in the culture industries or with the international agencies of exploitation – service work, infotainment, charities at best, the World Bank/IMF/UN just as likely). As to the specificity of Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) in the book as a whole – well, the band and the collective community music project are important as they are central to two chapters, in quite different ways (one on their UK work, one on West Bengal revolutionary politics), and these differences are necessary to the development of the argument and the politics I want to illustrate. Yet while ADF often travel easily outside the UK context (well-known in Europe, popular in the USA, stars in Japan, etc.), it is not only their politics that I would celebrate as the potential site of valorisation in my version of a transnational cultural studies. Before ADF, Aki Nawaz and Dave Watts' Fundamental were, and are, front runners of a wider cultural 'trend' – however contested, even by themselves – and as with all things 'Asian' in the youth culture market at present, they have also been 'flavour of the month' in complicated ways. But having toured the US with Oasis, been nominated for the Mercury Prize and with three successful albums, ADF are perhaps more flavoursome now. Though much of this book centres around different and diverse musics not readily or easily ascribed under the problematic hold-all category 'Asian', cultural production such as that of Fun^da^mental, the very different fantasy Asia of Kula Shaker and the general heterogeneity that surrounds the world music circuit are the favoured 'objects' of this analysis. It is still useful however if the dubious 'dub' of ADF also enables a self-critique of my own involvement as a commentator/writer – something neither to be hidden nor overplayed. The critique of exotica must also examine the advent of my own interests and motivations. Of course it helps to like these sounds. From the start I have to tell you that I am not against cross-over, mixing, dub or whatever. The dubious critiques offered here are then compromised by my personal involvement in the to and fro of ... well, of a white bowriting about black music and, as one report to a government agency puts it, showing an 'exclusive interest ... in the politics of the Left'.

I am not the only one compromised in some way here of course. The preparation of content for the liberal multiculturalism of the cultural smorgasbord implicates both well meaning Third Worldists and livelihood-seeking Third Worlders. Good intentions caught within a sometimes quite restricted and apolitical horizon transmute into an advertising programme for international capital hegemony. Hybridity and cultural diversity become much more than a relativist abdication or rejection of Enlightenment progress, but rather the diminutive version of a dominant ideology that works better than ever through complexity. This is why renewed thinking on appropriation and transnational cultural production may be needed now. The call would be for a new theoretical approach to cultural politics and music designed to shift debates beyond celebrations or condemnations of 'hybridity' and fusion or cross-over. Thus the argument is that although hybridity and other such buzzwords of cultural theory are 'dubious', there are ways in which other political agendas can be read, or rather should be read, into the cultural work produced by so-called hybrid selves. Of course the double argument for and against hybridity would need to be signalled. As this critique of exotica is elaborated, each chapter of this book addresses some form of cultural politics in performance, music or video, whether this be the 'hybridity-talk' and exoticism of world music festivals (Womad) or the anti-Islamic reaction to Fundamental in the context of their self-defence proselytising. The book includes a critique of appropriation as a dubious concept or category deployed by influential US writers on cultural creativity, and critiques of the appropriations made by the white left of exactly these 'cultural' contents in the interests of popular anti-racism. Along the way tele-technological factors impact upon cultural production as much as upon theorisations of diaspora and identity – and some may detect a Marxist criticism resident somewhere here too. The book is – like Rumour perhaps – about how well-meaning Other-love (anti-racism, esotericism, anthropology) can turn out to be its opposite, can be complicit at best, counter-productive at worst, part and parcel of the evil dynamic of capitalist exploitation, more often than not.

The book is not 'about' culture, though possibly slips, here and there on purpose, into sentences that reify. It is not comprehensive, complete, an authoritative introduction to any bounded scene (some may find sections where the tone seems authoritative, but please try to leave McCarthyite gut reactions at the door). The book is not always prescriptive. In essaying a series of stops along the way, this book perhaps works best as a partial, historical and personal – biased, perspectival, interested – accounting of several years of research and activism. It is a documentary record of sorts, rethought across changes of place and time. Transformations lurk here, not least in the styles of writing. Why the record is worth keeping in view is, I think, that the task of thinking through (negotiating seems too judicial a term) the complicities and complexities of cultural politics (this term seems not judicial enough, these days anyway) is one that has to be made public or visible, however contingent. The complexity cannot be an excuse for avoiding analysis; it is its rationale. Complicity cannot be an excuse for remaining mute; it is the condition of its expression.

In the end, what I am looking for in approaches to cultural production is something like what Theodor Adorno called the 'secret omnipresence' of resistance (Adorno 1991: 67). This can be seen as the possible inverse of that 'visibility' of culture which is not yet a sufficient politics. The argument is that more than visibility is required if cooption is not to be the beginning and end of cultural politics – visibility is a first and necessary move, a possible base, but upon this only a 'transnational literacy' (Spivak 1999: 357) that would trade visibility up into redress is adequate. I know that some friends will find this too much. I am thinking of Anamik Saha's excellent discussion of the band Cornershop and their contribution, or Raminder Kaur's sometimes more sympathetic line on Apache Indian (other takes on Apache Indian are scattered throughout the text, my own view is guarded). However, in offering a critique of the ways well-meaning scholars, well-meaning exotics and well-meaning but under-organised politicos all too often succumb to logics rather more violent than can be kept in focus, the task is to strive for a political literacy that disengages the metropole equivalent of the elite comprador restitution of colonisation that prevails today. (Either the capitalist roaders or the landlord class nationalists betray the promise of anti-colonialism, while in the 'centre' anti-racism is betrayed by performed illusions of equality and tolerant rhetoric which masks business-as-usual. Multiculturalism is the nominated face of the latter. Post-colonialism the former.)

A more focused question that breaks visibility into components might be to ask, in the context of diaspora, to what degree Birmingham remix maestro Bally Sagoo's cultural pride and assertion of a strong Asian identity is premised on the sophisticated militant organising power of anti-racist and self-defence activism and its record in Britain? Here the organising moment is known under the campaign names of those killed or maimed by racists – Stephen Lawrence, Rohit Dugall, Brian Douglas, Amer Rafiq – or of the organising groupings themselves – Asian Youth Movement, Indian Workers Association, Southall Black Sisters, Newham Monitoring Group, Satpal Ram Campaign. Certainly the work of ADF, Fundamental or Hustlers HC does more to acknowledge the heritage of struggle that has played a major part in clearing a space within the British polity for such cultural innovations as what Sanjay Sharma called the 'new Asian dance music' (Sharma 1994). What then of the obligation of high profile stars to do more than celebrate visibility? Bally announces the goal of achieving a Hindi-language number one chart hit on Top of the Pops (in Housee and Dar 1996), but the cultural politics of this visibility belongs to a history that is more complicated than such markers. Aki Nawaz of Fun^da^mental and Nation Records has several times complained that the start afforded various so-called 'Asian Kool' acts – such as Talvin Singh – at the Nation label has been disavowed, possibly because Nation's politics are a little too hot for chart success (see Chapters 3 and 6). At a level less relevant to egoistic grandstanding, the community and mass movement character of audience-centred performativity and political engagement (I don't mean to affirm the priority of the dance hall here, but that of participation at multiple levels) has meant a lesser level of personality cult than that with which commercial culture usually finds it convenient to deal. This in turn leads to a certain invisibility of those less easily manipulated forms of cultural production – we have long endured the astonishing eclipse of drum and bass, rave and dance culture's political context in the texts of commentators, journalistic and academic, and avatars of the 'scene'.

It seems that talk of complicity is rarely welcome news, even if we are all caught somewhere. The visibility of some South Asian stars in the Culture Industry is, in itself, potentially useful but not guaranteed progressive – a favourite trick co-opts a few high profile names to foster the illusion that everyone else is ok (the classic here is the prime-time TV interview with some successful Gangsta Rapper who comes 'Straight Outta Compton', a place where newscasters still fear to tread). All this said however, how does a book like this one contribute to both a refinement of the argumentation around the politics and poetics of visibility and remember an historical and political context that will bring lessons forward for today, for interventions in practice that transform ill-informed and academic good intentions into struggle adequate to win?

Authenticity and visibility based upon tactically affirmed cultural specificity are only part of any political project capable of posing a challenge to hegemonic Culture-Industry-enhanced-quite-late-capitalism. Post-authenticity, and a move to expression within a universalism of differences where action works against exploitation, possibly goes further. Against those that mobilise their economic resources to sell cultural product 'plundered' from elsewhere – we might name this gambit after Madonna, now as mercantile girl – there might also be a critique of those who dress up their 'own' culture for necessary rent-paying and survival strategy success, and cannot make a full accounting of the consequences when this refracts across airwaves and pixel-vision. That Talvin Singh's success is founded upon a subsumption of the years of bhangra is only one aspect of the to and fro of complicity and occlusion that comes with vision. It would of course be inappropriate to complain that appropriation was evil because of some cultural inauthenticity, as if ownership of cultural form were attributable and immutable, and that then such owners are obliged to reproduce unchanged and authentic pre-colonial forms (so long as these are not lost and forgotten). The thing about appropriation is not authenticity or not, but rather the capacity to profit from culture. This profiteering is also not simply to be better distributed, or merely redistributed, but rather production for profit – I have by now declared my hand – must be replaced with as yet unmanifest alternatives.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2000 John Hutnyk.
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Table of Contents

Alliances
1. Dub Introduction
2. Adorno At Womad
3. Dog Tribe
Appropriations
4. Magical Mystical Tourism
5. Authenticity Or Cultural Politics Internationalisms
6. Critique Of Postcolonial Marxisms
7. Naxalite
8. Conclusion
Index

Editorial Reviews

Focussing on music, race, and politics, Hutnyk (anthropology, Goldsmiths College) offers a theoretical critique of the "culture industry" and its shallow acceptance of multiculturalism. He also challenges academic complicity with the promotion of the "exotic," and urges the politicization of ethnographic research. Drawing from critical theory, he considers popular music as a location for political and cultural struggle, and outlines its organizing potential. Distributed in the US by Stylus. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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