ABSTRACT
Studies on musical nationalism have examined the constructed nature of national identities, which are (re)articulated, performed, contested, imposed, imagined, and labeled in different and often contradictory ways. Following Anderson’s view (1991) of the nation as an “imagined community,” Mallon (1995) reminds us that nations can be imagined in multiple ways depending on who does the imagining. Although hegemonic national identities reflect the ideologies and aesthetic values of the dominant classes, Chambers (1991) suggests that in times of political and economic instability there is “room for maneuver” for non-dominant groups to contend with or alter the official images, sounds, and rhetorical discourses of power, which he regards as a “disturbance” in the system that creates the conditions for changing the way things are. While popular expressions of national identity do not threaten to topple existing power structures, they have “a particular potential to change states of affairs, by changing people’s ‘mentalities’ (their ideas, attitudes, values, and feelings) …” (1991:1).
