Andrea Ancira García

Research Master Cultural Analysis

Dr. Joost de Bloois & Dr. Sophie Berrebi
Objects for Cultural Analysis

Cosmopolitanism: What we talk about when we talk about World Music

I
As many other forms of classification, musical genres describe and group music.
Through genre, people tend to describe what a certain musical item shares with others and
also what differentiates it. In fact, musical genre has become the most popular music
descriptor in the context of large musical databases and electronic music distribution
(Aucouturier, 2003: 1). The object of this paper is the category “world music”. Although
music genres such as jazz, rock, hip-hop normally describe musical features of the work of a
band or a specific song (tempo, pitch and rhythm); the main feature that recordings grouped
under this category seem to share is their politics of representation (Feld, 2000: 148).
Regardless of its musical characteristics, most non-western popular music has been lumped
into the general category of “world music”. What is the desire on my part to make its politics
of representation intelligible? Why make a close reading of a music genre?
World Music is not only an explicit example of the cultural arena in which unequal
power relations are embedded but also in which I found the possibility to explore the politics
and ethics of music. In this essay I address the significance of “world music” through the
concept of cosmopolitanism. As many theorists have noted, World Music has increasingly
been used as a vehicle for the cosmopolitan project (Roberts, 2008). However, as I will
further explain in this essay, while initially it served as a catalyst for mobilization around
transnational political issues, the commercialization of global music has made this music a
mass-cultural phenomenon that raises problems of cultural, economic and ethical politics
symptomatic of larger processes within the global cultural economy.
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II
Cosmopolitanism is generally associated to the consciousness of being a citizen of the
world and of finding ways of social, economic and political conviviality1. This idea has a
long theoretical lineage stretching back through the Greek Stoicism (Zenon), Christian
Theology (St. Paul), Kantian critical theory and on to present day articulations of global
democracy (Archibugi & Held, 1995). According to Roberts (2008), cosmopolitanism begins
with empire, in the contact zone between coloniser and colonized, in the space of often
unequal encounter and exchange with the cultural other. Within post-colonial theory, Walter
Mignolo (2000) also links cosmopolitan projects with colonialism. He points out that
cosmopolitan designs have been framed within coloniality’s different forms of exclusion and
articulation: either through Christianity as a planetary ideology (the rights of the people), or
around the nation-state and the law as grounds of colonialism (rights of man and of the
citizen), or as the need to regulate the planetary conflict between democracy and socialism
during the Cold War (human rights) (Mignolo, 2000: 26). Even in the postnational historical
context of the 1990s, Mignolo argues that colonialism has been reformulated in terms of
national diversity and cosmopolitanism (Mignolo 2000: 12). By refashioning Kant's
cosmopolitan ideas, liberal cosmopolitans such as Danielle Archibugi and David Held call for
the rise of a “universal system of cosmo-political governance”, which would ultimately
undermine the nation-state as the “sole centre of legitimate power within [its]own borders”
(Archibugi & Held, 1995).
The theoretical lineage to which I made reference above is not coincidental. As
Mignolo points out, cosmopolitan projects “shall be seen not only as a chronological order
but also as the synchronic coexistence of colonialism” (Mignolo, 2000: 26). The framework
in which the three cosmopolitan designs mentioned above is clearly linked to three different
stages of the modern/colonial world system (the Spanish empire and Portuguese colonialism
theorized by Vitoria; the British empire and French and German colonialism defended by
Kant, and U.S. imperialism after the Cold War). In other words, cosmopolitan projects have
been at work during both moments of modernity. The first was a religious project; the second
was secular. Both, however, were linked to coloniality and to the emergence of the
modern/colonial world: “Coloniality, in other words, is the hidden face of modernity and its
very condition of possibility” (Mignolo, 2000: 3). The link of cosmopolitanism and

                                                        
1
The term originates in the Greek words cosmos (world) and polis (city, people, citizenry)
  3 

colonialism reveals that rather than genuine attempts of world conviviality, cosmopolitan
narratives have been constructed and structured from the perspective of modernity/coloniality
thereby reproducing unequal power relations. Following Mignolo, I argue that the
cosmopolitan project that emerged in the “postnational” world order, to which I link the
category of “world music”, arose from within modernity, and as such, it has failed to escape
its liberal ideological frame. In this sense, the dominant discourse of “world music” gives an
image of the world as a “global village” where differences are happily being blurred, similar
to the discourse embedded in the normative concept of “global civil society”.
The liberal-cosmopolitan idea of “global civil society” refers to the widening,
deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness and interdependence (Archibugi &
Held, 1995). The same idea can be found in World Music in the appreciation of hybridity and
hybrid cultures. As Ashawani Sharma notes: “World Music promotions often position
exceptional artists rooted in their specific musical cultures, and re-work their music through
the encounter and fusion with Western technology and production. This meeting with the
West is seen as enhancing the music. However, the valorization of particular musical artists
as global 'ethnic' stars also has the effect of marginalizing and ignoring the vast body of
musical forms that have not had the 'fortune' of encountering the West” (Sharma et al., 1996:
24). Hybridity takes a particular form in which the nature of ‘ethnic authenticity’ is
recomposed. By placing these ‘global stars’ within particular imagined, but fixed ethnicities,
World Music industry makes invisible the artists’ displacement and marginality; and it limits
their possibility of transcending their own cultural particularity (Sharma et al., 1996).
Despite being normative ideals to reflect the global public sphere (either in politics or
music), the more the principle of inclusion of people or musics in a global community its
emphasized, the more this idea disregards the limits of inclusion of marginalized people and
musics (Kitamura, 2005). As Jan Aart Scholte (2000) mentions regarding the inadequate
representation in the so-called “global civil society”:
“In terms of civilizational inputs, supraterritorial civic activity has on the
whole drawn much more from Western Judeo-Christian traditions than
from African, Buddhist, Confucian, Eastern Orthodox, Hindu, Islamic and
other culture (…) Moreover, it has shown a pronounced class bias
spreading disproportionately within urban-based, (relatively) high-earning,
university-educated, computer-literate, English-speaking professionals
(…) In sum, participation in global civil society has revealed many of the
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same patterns of inequality that have marked the globalizing world

political economy more generally” (p.31).
This statement can be applied to the different sites of agency2 involved in the World Music
industry in which participation has almost always been limited to Western actors and their
collaborations (often under unequal conditions) with Non-Western musicians.
The cosmopolitan quest for a peaceful conviviality of world citizens within the liberal
discourse is operated dialogically and through the institutionalization of deliberative
procedures (Tambakaki, 2009). In this sense, cosmopolitanism is based on the same “post-
political” principle on which liberal democracies are also grounded: consensus as the central
goal of a society. Its defenders argue that through consensus the chaotic and disordered
nature of human sociability will be overcome (Rancière, 2007). For liberal cosmopolitans, the
solution to international anarchy consists in either limiting it by legal and other means, or
elevating it to the global level (Morozov, 2010: 5). This is the reason why cosmopolitanism
has been associated with grand projects like the construction of a world federation of
republican states, or even the creation of a world state.
As Rancière (2007) has noted, this particular understanding of democracy, and I
extend it to cosmopolitanism, does not allow to see the demos or the citizen of the world as a
subject present in the social body, a subject able to question or change collections and orders,
but as a subject who defines themself3 by their positive relationship to a certain set of rules of
a community. Both, liberal cosmopolitanism and democracy, exclude conflict, paradoxes,
disagreements and differences in the name of consensus. Contrary to what these theories
suggest, Chantal Mouffe and other critical theorists underline the importance of difference in
the construction of a cosmopolitan political community. They argue that just like “dissent” in
democracies, “difference” guarantees plurality and change in a given community or system
(Derrida 1997; Nancy 2000; Mouffe 2008). These theorists situate antagonism and conflict
on the ontological level, therefore as institutive of all human societies and constitutive of
politics. For example, in Mouffe’s (1999) criticism of consensus as a core value of modern
democracies, she states:
“What is specific and valuable about modern democracy is that, when
properly understood, it creates a space in which this confrontation is kept
                                                        
2
Stokes (2003) questions the idea that large and powerful corporations have a total control of this music
industry. Rather he suggests understanding this phenomenon as a result of material forces that both enable and
constrain the movement of music and musicians around the globe. He theorizes these “material forces” as sites
of agency, mainly the actors involved: recording industry, migrant culture, and nation-states (299).
3
Although this form is not widely accepted in standard English, According to the Oxford Dictionary, the
singular form “themself” can be used as a neutral gender pronoun instead of ‘himself’ or ‘herself’.
  5 

open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory
can be final. (…) This agonal democracy requires that conflict and division
become accepted as inherent elements in politics and the
acknowledgement that there is no moment in which reconciliation can be
achieved as a complete actualization of the unity of the people.”(745-748)
With the concept of agonal democratic politics, the idea of a democratic society or a
cosmopolitan community goes beyond the institutional principles in which a political regime
(either domestic or international) is grounded. Instead, in its broadest sense, is a form of
subjectivity through which the political subject exists in a given community and whose
participation takes the form of a counterpower (Rancière, 2007: 9). In this sense, Rancière’s
democratic society would resemble what Mouffe (2008) describes as the alternative form of
cosmopolitan community, a “multipolar order” in which opposing political projects
constantly pluralize and challenge the established hegemonies. This understanding both of
the democratic and the cosmopolitan community suggests the impossibility of conceiving a
community with a determined or fixed form, since its internal divisions and differences will
never stop working, and reorienting and altering it by the praxis of open confrontation.
(Chaui, 2008: 7). In this sense, democracy or cosmopolitanism are no longer the realm of the
common law and consensus; they become the space where facticity lends itself to
contingency and to the resolution of the egalitarian layout of a society.
To explain this argument, I will look closely at the theoretical perspective that
informs this position. Instead of basing an understanding of democracy or ethico-political
relations on a particular human nature or essence as liberal cosmopolitanism does, Mouffe
opts for a more relational view of subjectivity. She uses the notion of the constitutive outside
which she borrows from Derrida to explain the ineradicability of antagonism in a community.
According to the notion of the constitutive outside, an ‘outside’ or difference, both conditions
the emergence of an object and prevents its full realization (Arash, 2005: 109). This is to say
that the outside is far from the simple opposite of the inside, they rather codeterminate each
other: it only makes sense to refer to the outside in the context of the inside, and vice versa.
This philosophical assumption is precisely what leads Mouffe (1996) to argue that
antagonism is always potential and ineradicable in politics and that difference is constitutive
of cosmopolitics:
“It is because every object has inscribed in its very being something other
than itself and that as a result, everything is constructed as differance, that
its being cannot be conceived as pure “presence” or “objectivity”. Since
  6 

the constitutive outside is present within the inside as its always real
possibility, every identity becomes purely contingent. This implies that we
should conceptualise power not as an external relation, taking place
between two preconstituted identities but rather as constituting the
identities themselves.” (247)
In the same line, as Baker (2009) notes, Derrida suggests to view cosmopolitanism as
synonymous with an ethics of hospitality. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
hospitality deconstructs the dialectical account of identity and difference embedded in the
liberal discourse of cosmopolitanism and turns cosmopolitanism away from the pure ethics of
its liberal variants, transforming it into an ethicopolitics where difference is always
presupposed (Derrida, 1998). Derrida presents universality and singularity in irreconcilable
tension but as Mouffe, a tension that is productive of differance (Lumdsen, 2007). This takes
me back to the initial question of this essay, which I will explore in the next section; what
form of cosmopolitan community does the category or “world music” suggests?

III
The concept “world music” was first circulated by academics in the early 1960’s as
an alternative and less academic term to ethnomusicology. In their inception, both concepts
were meant to include non-western music and performers in western music institutions.
However, the dualism embedded in these concepts reproduced the marginalization of “the
other”, leaving the relationship of the colonizing and the colonized almost intact (Feld, 2000:
147). Just as “world music” intended to include non-western music in western institutions,
the concept “global civil society” intends to include non-western nation-states to the Western
International Community. As Baker points out, the concept of global civil society shares the
same fundamental problem as state sovereignty, namely that it is better at articulating global
identity than difference because it reproduces statist attempts to describe a universal structure
of particularity (Baker, 2009: 107). Although it might seem that there is recognition of “the
other”, this concept reduces difference to a universal identity, avoiding the recognition of the
infinite forms of difference and singularities4 of a social body. This is the discourse on
difference that has successfully permeated the music industry with the use of the concept of
“world music”.
                                                        
4
In Being Singular Plural Nancy (2000) explains the plurality within singularity: ‘The singular is primarily
each one and, therefore, also with and among all the others. The singular is a plural’ (32).Thus, singularity does
not make sense unless it is seen with or in relation to the other singularities that make it singular and it can never
be fully realized.
  7 

Record labels and concert promoters adopted this term in the late 1980s to expand the
global market for popular music through the incorporation of new alternative genres and
audiences, the former non-western and the latter mainly western, within the music industry. It
replaced categories such as “traditional music,” “international music,” and “ethnic music” in
the popular music market place. This period’s world music production was characterized by
pop star collaboration and curation sponsored by the Western pop music elite and their record
companies who were able to finance artistic forays into a world that would quickly come to
be experienced as geographically expansive and aesthetically familiar (Feld, 2000: 149).
World Music production has changed its tendencies overtime however, it has often
taken two roads: either through ethnomusicology—a tendency mostly based on salvage
ethnology, or on the West’s search for authentic, endangered cultures and sounds— or
through the hybridization of these musical traditions commonly presented in multiple music
genres, such as world beat, fusion, ethnopop, tribal as well as ambient, trance, and new age.
Despite the fact that world music thrives in various landscapes, which result from global
flows, the idea of world music remains “a flight from the Western-self at the very moment of
the self’s suffocating hegemony as though people were driven away by the image stalking
them in the mirror” (Brennan, 2001: 4). According to Sharma, “this universalization of a
specific and undifferentiated category of a subject renders the violence endemic in the
production of migrancy/coloniality invisible. It decontextualizes “the other” from her socio-
economic and historical situation, transforming her into the transcendental subject of
subalternity and/or of the postmodern subject, outside the workings of contemporary neo-
colonialism” (Sharma et al., 1996: 19).
Damai (2007) shows that within this monological order of cosmopolitanism, even at
its best, World Music remains an echo of the sounds from a few powerful states that control
the media (118). These sites of agency not only succeed in globally marketing their music,
but they are also capable of co-opting sounds produced to resist—or at least to escape—the
grip of their monologue. Brennan (2001) gives the example of salsa and he says: “What most
people understand to be salsa today is a joining in sound of 1970s already established
American popular and commercial forms” (Brennan, 2001: 48). He uses this example to
show how different forms of non-western music have had to take certain roads, which means
that there were other roads they could not take, or in the case of “salsa” that they did take but
only in an isolated context as it happened in Cuba—a country partially protected from the
world market. The problem that Brennan (2001) and Roberts (2008), in the specific cases of
  8 

Salsa and Brazilian Tropicalismo, want to point out is not the North Americanization of these
musics, but rather the limited openness of the market to non-Western forms of music.
This category per se does not reproduce and perpetuate an exotic and obscure image
of “the other”. As Stokes (2003) mentions, this would not have been much different if this
music had been labeled as “third world music” (147). This happens mainly on how the music
industry, the academy and other sites of agency have framed it and presented it to the public:
as heterogeneous musical forms encoded in terms of nation and national cultures, that either
have little to do with the hegemonic national culture or cross the boundaries of nation-states,
reducing these cultures to essentialist and traditional fixities. This has led to the reproduction
of the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of historical elites through global tourism and other forms
of cultural consumption. Although many academics have unveiled the undemocratic5 nature
of this category, most of the attempts for deconstructing it have remained in the theoretical
and academic realm. In this essay I would like to show an example within the music industry
in which this category has been questioned in practice, thereby suggesting other forms of
presenting and conceiving World Music and even a cosmopolitan community.
The reason why the deconstruction of this category has had little echo in the music
industry is because it shows a world that goes against “the wheel of sovereignty of a single
State” (Damai, 2007). As I already mentioned, this category is used to describe a universal
structure of particularity rather than to articulate difference. Furthermore, the production and
commercialization of this music is made by the major actors of the “archon”, mainly
multinational labels6 and nation-states who are more interested in legitimating a universal
particularity rather than singularities that could put into question the definition of already
established and legitimized communities. However, these actors have not been entirely
successful in controlling the whole market, there are still few small independent labels that
produce world music and try to suggest a different cosmopolitan community in their music
catalogues. Sublime Frequencies’ international radio collages provide a useful critical
vantage point. I will make a close reading of their catalogue to show an example of how
through the way the music is presented to the public, the category of world music is
dismantled suggesting an alternative cosmopolitan community, which differs from a single
monological world order.

                                                        
5
In Archive Fever Derrida (1998) suggests that an Archive is not democratic, when it is not being transparent on
how its representations are being built in it.
6
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates that the multinationals (mainly
Japanese, American and European) control approximately 80 to 90 percent of sales of legally recorded music
worldwide.
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IV
Sublime Frequencies is a small, independent record label from Seattle (USA)
completely self-financed by Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet. It started unofficially in the
early 1980s as a personal project with Alan Bishop’s collected music and recordings from
North Africa and the Middle East during his trips in these regions. This continued into the
90s spreading to East Asia until he finally decided to officially prepare his collages for public
consumption in 2003. This label specializes in content and techniques that question other
approaches to popular non-western music which highlight an artificial purity in the music of
these regions, separating and isolating it to preserve it in a little box where nothing can affect
it. As Bishop mentioned in an interview with Dave Segal (2005): “god forbid a plane flies
over during a recording, they’ll cut that out and make it as pure as possible. It’s not reality
anymore”.
Against scientific objectivity and the “over-mediated and off-putting pedagogical
quality of most ethnomusicological releases” (Segal, 2005), Sublime Frequencies’ raw
material comes from radio snippets, pop tunes from street vendors’ cassettes, and anthologies
that are explicitly products of their compilers’ subjective experience. Moreover, its collage-
like aesthetics creates a musical surreality that disrupts and critiques dominant modes of
creating and appreciating music (Damai, 2007). Unlike traditional world music recordings,
Bishop eschews the common desire to preserve something in its original state, treating the
music as malleable and showing that traditional music is dynamic and has the capacity to
change (Provan, Dusted Magazine). He even includes western popular music in his collages
making visible but more important, making audible the western popular music influence in
this remote places’ music production
Sublime Frequencies works as a minority in the World Music industry. Deleuze and
Guattari define minority in opposition to majority, but insist that the difference between them
is not quantitative since social minorities can be more numerous than the so-called majority.
The minority is defined by the gap which separates its members from the standard, while the
majority is defined as the group that most closely approximates that standard; it implies a
state of domination. Thus, the relevance of a minority stems on the questions it raises about
difference and the defense of the particular against all forms of universalisation or
representation (Patton, 2000: 74). The radio-collage collections of Sublime Frequencies
exemplify the minoritarian workings of this label. The unique practice of radio collage is the
creative process in which the production of this label becomes different or diverges from the
  10 

majority of world music labels. Its music makes an open call to the listener towards
becoming-the other. In this sense, the clips of each song are blocks of becomings that create a
space of processes and knowledge in which local and global identities are being continually
negotiated, and where histories and memories are being re-narrated. This emphasis on
production rather than on fixed identities draws attention to the listener as producer rather
than consumer of his culture and society, which in turn are understood as invisible and
transient assemblages rather than solid and fixed products and contracts (Voegelin, 2010:
154).
The International Radio Collage collection of this label includes the following
albums: Radio Java, Radio Palestine, Radio Algeria, Radio India, Radio Sumatra, Radio
Morocco and Radio Thailand, among others. These records offer a diverse soundspace from a
number of places resisting the projection or representation of “the other” based on the
ethnocentric discourse. Although the label keeps the national tags and the kitsch album art
characteristic of world music records, it is through sound that Bishop intends to disrupt the
listener’s idea of World Music. The lack of correspondence between the sound and the image
triggers a split where the eye becomes the ear and vice versa producing a new space
articulated by an “amicable difference” of the sensorial material (Voegelin, 2010). This split
can be considered as a space for musical and cultural differences to emerge in such a manner
that any identification with the hegemonic order is weakened and disrupted by the shifting,
contingent contacts of musical and cultural encounters (Sharma, 1996). What happens in the
encounters that occur in those moments, and how those encountered feel about it, is an open
question, and one that Alan Bishop wishes to provoke.
News reports, theatrical commercials, clips of songs, voices, snippets from a radio
play, radio static and ambient local sounds are some of the basic elements that make up the
sound-collage works of Alan Bishop. Although these collections often sound like a stream of
consciousness or the mere record of a particular person’s stroll along the radio dial, the
sounds and the music in each compilation have been clearly prepared and selected with each
other in mind. In this sense, one could argue that Alan Bishop and his collaborators at
Sublime Frequencies are like documentary filmmakers who piece together found footage. In
the end their sound collages could be read as a work whose originality is purely a function of
montage (Boon, 2006).
Montage is usually associated to the 20th century Western avant-garde artistic
practice that emerged as a politically motivated attempt to destroy or rearrange a consensus.
This artistic practice produced a direct transformation of consciousness in the audience by
  11 

juxtaposing traditional and experimental elements in the art works. Boon compares this
label’s collection with previous montage practices and describes Sublime Frequencies’
collages as "ethnopsychedelic" - a music of strange jumps, juxtapositions and alliances that
are not situated easily on either side of the modern/traditional divide in opposition to the kind
of smooth fusions that world music aspires to. He states: “their sound montages cut through
the boundaries that make up ‘us’ and ‘them’ creating an open, fragmentary space in which
unexpected sounds surge up, lines of flight that send us, not into pure abstraction, but into
moments of other people's lived history” (Boon, 2006).
This invasion of the domestic sphere by the public world is what makes this radio
collages unhomely, and thus homeless. Bhabha (1994) refers to the invasion of the domestic
sphere by the public world as the “unhomely” moment. He describes how the borders
between the home and the outside world become confused: “Private and public, past and
present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that
questions binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially
opposed” (340). With their unhomely resonance, these sounds create insterstitial spaces that
displace the binary opposition of self and other. The cuts in these albums are a clandestine
community of sounds that not only resists being intelligible, they also resist being worldly in
the sense of being the easily translatable and classifiable performance of the ethnic other. As
Damai (2007) suggests, this music is not cosmopolitan in the sense that it is World Music,
but that it resists the idea of the world music that is predicated on the wheel of sovereignty of
the individual State. It seeks to interrupt the monologue of the western idea or concept of
world music, not by imagining an absolute exterior or by pretending to produce adapted
sounds or compositions but by representing a world-to-come as the impossible and
hauntological ‘exchange’ between the self and the other, or between different parts of the
world. Its aesthetic politics lies in their representation of world music as a tower in ruin, or a
house that stands on the impossibility of being a house (119). It is a haunted house in which
every sound echoes the specter of difference and otherness. In Des Tour de Babel, Derrida
(1985) states:
“The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity
of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of
totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of
edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the
multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a “true translation, a
  12 

transparent and adequate inter-expression, it is also a structural order, a

coherence of construct. (218)
As in Derrida’s analysis of the deconstruction of the tower of Babel, these collages signify
the impossibility of a single or monolithic tower of world music. By rupturing the tower, a
differential space is created in order for the other to speak or to be heard. It is through this
space that these collages incarnate a cosmopolitan world in the Derridean sense presenting a
sense of rupture, difference, and disjuncture that is evident for example in the album Radio
Sumatra: The Indonesian FM Experience. In this compilation Alan Bishop assembled
excerpts from over 60 cuts lifted from the FM airwaves of the major Indonesian cities in the
summer of 2004, producing a sound collage that highlights the kaleidoscopic variety of the
media in Indonesia. The sampling platter includes local pop, rock, dance, metal, hip-hop, and
jazz tunes, all bearing the strong influence of the Western music world, yet still firmly rooted
in the local culture, a culture that is itself a blend of Asian and Arab influences (Couture, All
Music Guide). The segments of chatter, news, weather, station IDs and ads show how much
FM radio is cast in the same mold, no matter what country you live in.
The rapid cycling of sounds in the album makes it difficult for the listener to gain a
very concrete conception of the music or the culture itself, the clippings, sounds and songs
included are an effort to frustrate the desire to reduce a culture to a single document (Provan,
Dusted Magazine). One of the last tracks of the album, “Heavy Rotations”, starts with the
announcement of heavy rotations. This announcement is followed by the first rotation, a clip
of beating drums from a Buddhist monastery, which in turn gives way to another rotation, a
call to prayer from a mosque. These rotations are juxtaposed to a couple of playful
commercial and tunes to dangdut style music, all of which eventually culminate in a hip-hop
rap in Bahasa Indonesian. As Damai (2007) shows, these rotations are not simply multiple,
nor do they merely form a musical collage. Nor are they an unproblematic representation of
history—a history of colonization, imperialism, and genocide—from which they are
invariably indissociable. Through the surreal continuity and arrest that at once connect them,
they reveal the way one rotation is exposed, questioned or even vulnerable to the other. These
rotations not only form a sonic labyrinth, but by moving towards exteriority or by “being
drawn out of oneself” they open space or time itself, thereby making a becoming-world
possible, which is different from the totalizing world of “world music” or globalization.
The variety of sounds from the cities, streets, mountain tracks, and temples and
monasteries presented in these albums demonstrate not only the plurality within singularity,
but also the impossibility of any exhaustive or even fairly representative recording of sounds
  13 

from any of these countries. By resisting the urge to concentrate on some exotic sounds of
one ethnic minority or place, this collection not only juxtaposes and interrupts sonic
experiences—thereby invoking their incompleteness—but it also keeps the music forever
open in order for the other sounds to be heard (Damai, 2007). In this sense, the clips of these
albums resemble what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the voice of the community”, or the music that
interrupts itself:
“If it must be affirmed that myth is essential to community-but only in the
sense that it completes it and gives it the closure and the destiny of an
individual, of a completed totality- it is equally necessary to affirm that in
the interruption of myth is heard the voice of the interrupted community,
the voice of the incomplete, exposed community speaking as myth without
being in any respect mythic speech. This voice seems to play back the
declarations of myth, for in the interruption there is nothing new to be
heard, there is no new myth breaking through: it is the old story one seems
to hear” (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 62)
When a voice or music is suddenly interrupted, says Nancy, one hears just at the moment “a
mixture of various silences and noises that had been covered over by the sound”, in other
words, at such instances “one hears again the voice or music that has become in a way the
voice or music of its own interruption”. It is precisely these interruptions that the voice or
music undergoes in order to make itself audible that make articulation an event. Then, the
articulation of the other takes place as the overwhelming event of the arrival of “the other”,
even at the moment when the host, as in the case of Tibet/China, Palestine/Israel, or
India/Pakistan, is not at all ready to receive “the other” as the guest. These albums infinitize
“the other” by listening to the multiple sites of “otherness”, and also by musically thinking
the other infinitely. It keeps the rotations of music open and free from the monlogic idea of
sameness of the Being (Damai, 2007).

V
In this essay I tried to link the category “world music” with the concept of
cosmopolitanism. While the relationship of these concepts might seem obvious, a close
reading of both allowed me to tinge the different layers that interplay in their connection. I
presented two different interpretations of the cosmopolitan community and contrasted them
with the category of “world music” to show the politics and ethics behind it. I argued that the
way this category is used in the music industry and moreover the way it is given content
  14 

through the music that is grouped under its name and the way it is normally presented to the
public, does not escape the liberal cosmopolitan discourse of a monological order.
This category builds representations where “the other” is encoded in terms of nation
and national cultures and where “the other” becomes the object of tourism and the colors of
liberal multiculturalism. This discourse tampers any possibility for the emergence of
singularities, difference and alternative projects for the cosmopolitan community implicit in
the category of “world music”. It is a category where the Western community welcomes “the
other”, however “the other” already has a role to play in this community, they don’t get to
question or change the orders or collections of this community and therefore their political
participation is defined by their positive relationship to a certain set of rules already
established in the community.
As I mentioned, there are some examples within the music industry where the
category of “world music” is being questioned and perhaps transformed. The example I
presented was the American independent label Sublime Frequencies, I argued that their
“International Radio Collages” suggest a different cosmopolitan community based on
hospitality, where the relation to “the other” guides everything concerning the bond between
singularities. I argued that the way this label questions this category allows one to think of
World Music and the cosmopolitan community differently, where difference might not only
be a positive element in cosmopolitanism but a presupposed and crucial element for its
existence.
As I already outlined, Mouffe (2008) places difference and antagonism right at the
centre of her approach to democracy and cosmopolitanism. She argues that the aim of a
democratic politics should be to transform this antagonism into agonism by producing
opposing political projects that will pluralize and thereby challenge the established
hegemonies. These counter-hegemonic articulations represent what Mignolo (2000) calls
“border thinking” or “border epistemology”. According to this author “inclusion does not
seem to be the solution to cosmopolitanism any longer, insofar as it presupposes that the
agency that establishes the inclusion is itself beyond inclusion: ‘he’ being already within the
frame from which it is possible to think of ‘inclusion’”(736). Border thinking as he frames it,
is the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of
people in subaltern positions.
In trying to extrapolate this analysis to my object, the tension between the theoretical
solution and the object became visible: ethics versus market. World Music, as other cultural
identities, objects and practices has been transformed into a commodity, and as such it is
  15 

framed within a production/consumption logic that goes beyond the ethics presented as an
alternative cosmopolitanism in this essay. This became even more evident when I reflected
on the label I chose to exemplify the possibility of practicing this “alternative”
cosmopolitanism. While Sublime Frequencies does question the dominant conception of
World Music, this articulation does not come from the “subaltern perspective”. As Stokes
(2003) notes, the same applies to similar independent labels, which are mainly based in
Western metropolis such as London, Paris or New York. However I would not promptly
discard this project as a counter-hegemonic articulation. From the close reading of the
International Radio Collages of Sublime Frequencies, it is clear that this articulation seeks to
subvert the ideological parochialism of World Music and it indeed offers a different
interpretation of this category.
The question regarding how or when these counter-hegemonic projects in the music
industry or global politics will come from subaltern positions still remains. It is beyond the
scope of this paper to describe the few but significant articulations being made not only in the
music industry but also in the political realm. However, it is essential to recognize that only
through this forms of articulation or counter-articulation, “world music” as well as
“cosmopolitanism” and “democracy” will become arenas in the struggle to overcome
coloniality of power, rather than full-fledged words with specific Western content.

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Discography
Radio Algeria. Sublime Frequencies. SF CD 029.
Radio India: The Eternal Dream of Music. Sublime Frequencies. SF CD 021.
Radio Morocco. Sublime Frequencies. SF CD 007.
Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Meditarranean. SF CD CD 021.
Radio Phnom Penh. Sublime Frequencies. SF CD 020.
Radio Sumatra: Indonesian FM Experience. Sublime Frequencies. SF CD 021.
Tibetan Buddhism: The ritual Orchestra and Chants. Nonesuch Explorer. CD.
Tibetan Ritual. UNESCO, CD.
Songs and Music of Tibet. Smithsonian Folkways. CD