Dis-Orienting Rhythms

This book writes back the presence of South Asian youth into a rapidly expanding and exuberant music scene; and celebrates this as a dynamic expression of the experience of diaspora with an urgent political consciousness. One of the first attempts to situate such production within the study of race and identity, it uncovers the crucial role that South Asian dance musics - from Hip-hop, Qawwali and Bhangra through Soul, Indie and Jungle - have played in a new urban cultural politics.

In opposing all-too-easy 'world music' categorizations, the contributors demonstrate throughout how the liberal alibi of multiculturalism can be challenged across the line of music and politics. The book as a whole is committed to political engagement that does not reduce popular culture to the scrutinized Other or simply celebrate new expressive cultures as fragmented and hybrid.

For a Black politics - this book is required reading for students and academics in cultural studies and social theory; as well as for everyone engaged in anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggles.