The Art of Representing the Other
This chapter explores how industry personnel respond to audience and industry expectations by examining the negotiations behind the production of world music. The chapter looks behind and underneath world music products to analyze, not just the effects of representational decisions, but also how people make these decisions—how they negotiate the dynamics of representational and interpretive distortion. Industry personnel work with musicians and audiences to develop products that are authentic and sellable. They play with and push against markers of authenticity that intersect and parallel each other on axes of locality and globality, liveness and mediation, marginality and mainstream, purity and hybridity. Authenticity occupies different positions on these axes depending on musicians’, industry actors’, and audiences’ expectations. As they negotiate this web of expectations, industry personnel reinforce and contest the discourses of alterity, essentialist stereotypes, and unequal power dynamics that continue to be so problematic in the world music industry.