ABSTRACT
If this is the background to Lennon’s rhetoric, it is worth picking up his key terms and applying them to concluding moments in previous chapters. If it is the case, then, that “the postcolonial fetters have been weakened,” revealing new fractures and hybridities, what is it exactly that is uncovered, “beyond the mask,” and in what sense is it real? If “passive ‘beings’ low in the gender, racial and class hierarchies have begun to nd voices,” demanding of us “the intelligent analysis of the di erences on o er,” how can we know which voice is true? If the nexus of di erences and repetitions in the music mediate “between ‘reality’ and the Real,” what manner of subjectivities are conjured up, “what would be the missing Repräsentanz of this Vorstellung”? Or are popular music’s reality-e ects — its “collective fantasy” — no more than illusion, devoid of aesthetic veracity, epistemological credibility, and political e cacy alike?
