ABSTRACT
The world music phenomenon tells a simple but resonant story. Suffused with a gentle millennial mysticism as the twentieth century drew to a close, it suggested that something quite new was afoot. A world in which ideas, cultures, and senses of identity were woven snugly and securely into place by the nation-state was unraveling. Previously unimaginable connections were possible, thanks to the increasingly uninhibited circulation of people, ideas, and things. And a previously unimaginable politics was emerging, one capable of addressing truly global issues, ranging from the environment to women’s, children’s and indigenous people’s rights. What better image of this world than the grooving together of cultures remote from one another in music, that perennial source of social warmth in modernity’s cold world?
