ABSTRACT
In a globalized world, culture can become a hotly contested territory as it ceases to be the appanage of nation-states. Culture and music become the apparatus for contesting national realities and received identities, and for proposing instead transnational models and unfixed cultural spaces. In this chapter, I am using Romanian diasporic websites based in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, countries that attracted significant Eastern European labor migration in the post-communist period, to study the online exchange and consumption of music by migrants. Music, and the way migrants relate to it, and reflect upon its significance and value becomes the conduit that channels their understanding of emerging diasporic culture and the diasporic condition. Through musical preferences that range from 1970s dissident rock and Schlager (the pop music of communism) to postcommunist turbo folk (manele), digital migrants express their ambivalent relationship to the homeland and national culture as well as their aspirations toward a new spiritual Heimat anchored in the liquidity of migratory experiences. In his excellent and now classic analysis of music and identity, Simon Frith (1996, 109) postulates that music experiences can be defined as ‘self-in-process’ since identity is mobile. Diasporic voices best illustrate the process of being and becoming, which inherently produces disagreements and contradictions, but also offers the basis for contesting traditional understandings of culture.
