ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three key conceptual themes within Sarathy Korwar 2019 album More Arriving. Firstly, this chapter highlights how Korwar’s fusion music unsettles dominant (largely white) narratives around ‘world music’ and pushes back against music industry attempts to ‘fit’ Indian music into a Western form that is palatable for white listeners. Secondly, this chapter examines the political sound-making and listening practices, or which this chapter terms the political brown auralities of various South Asian identities articulated on the album. Thirdly, this chapter questions how digital spaces may further amplify the South Asian diasporic self-representations and expressions of identity constructed via More Arriving. This chapter shows how Korwar’s music videos for ‘Bol’ and ‘Turner on the 20’ mirror, mimic, and invert the colonial gaze; it also suggests that Korwar’s dissemination of his music and videos via Bandcamp and YouTube is a means of exploiting the affordances of capitalist digital resources in order to form online counterpublics. The chapter concludes that it is within such counterpublics, that counter-discourses and anti-essentialist renderings of hybrid music can be circulated among global audiences.
