The subject “Music,” even delimited by the titular “Postcolonial Studies,” describes an enormous range of musical styles and genres from an expansive geography composed, performed, and listened to in a vast array of personal, social, religious, and political circumstances. Given its highly mobile circulation across political borders and its facile interpenetration of multifarious cultural expressions, music promises a portrait of a utopic postcolonial admixture of cultures, much as creolité provides in language. At the same time, “world music” raises questions about differential relations of power and histories of colonialism and postcoloniality that the term seems to elide. This entry demonstrates not only the asymmetry of power relations in the movement of music from West to East, but also underscores both the indigenization of European forms and the interpenetration of musical styles between colonized nations and among various, primarily Anglophone, diasporas.

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