Presumably it is diference that kills otherness. Baudrillard 1990: 13 1 orld music is popularly believed to be a "roots" phenomenon, an Yet, as the analysis of recent examples reveals, world music could also be more properly considered as a typical product of consumer society. The term "world music" itself had emerged in the mid-l980s, initially as little more than a handy term for musics as vastly heterogeneous as lambada, Paul Simon's Graceland, and Mory Kante's Ykkt Yikt. By 1988, however, "worldbeat"-as world music is more commonly known in the U.S.-was described by Newsweek magazine as the fastest growing sector of the international pop market.' Although, in the mid-l990s, this expansive trend has somewhat abated, elements of world music have now crossed over into a vast range of other musics, such as avant-garde jazz, John Zorn's work comes to mind here, some recent New Age albums like Andreas Vollenweider's Book of Roses and Hector Zazou's Les nouvelles polyphonies corses or even dancefloor and hip hop. This broadening of the phenomenon, it seems to me, directs attention to a number of issues which have been insufficiently explored in earlier discussions of world music. W expression of national and ethnic identities and multicultural diversity.

How do Western images of Africa and African representations of the West mirror one another? This book examines the complex issues involved in the making of modern identities in Africa, Europe, and the US via a study of two striking episodes in the history of black South African music. The first is a pair of tours of two black South African choirs in England and America in the early 1890s; the second is a series of engagements with the international music industry as experienced by the premier choral group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, after the release of Paul Simon's celebrated Graceland album in 1986.

Une classe ouvrière en formation ? Crise économique et stratégies ouvrières chez les mineurs dagara du Ghana. Ce travail examine les réactions des travailleurs migrants dagara à la crise économique et sociale qui frappe l'industrie des mines d'or du Ghana. Au lieu qu'émerge une classe de mineurs de la deuxième ou troisième génération, stable, urbanisée, autonome et dotée d'une solide conscience de classe, on constate que les stratégies de survie des mineurs dagara incluent, en plus du travail salarié, la mobilisation de toute une série de ressources économiques, sociales et culturelles : diversification des sources de revenus ; redéploiement géographique des activités économiques au sein de la famille étendue et maintien de liens étroits avec la région d'origine ; adhésion à des organisations ethniques. Les auteurs abordent également le rôle de la chefferie et de l'ethnicité dans les mines qui, loin d'être de purs instruments au service de la domination du capital, sont une composante essentielle des stratégies de survie des mineurs.

Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the “hope,” as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape.