ABSTRACTBonino's article casts light on the realities and perceptions of ethno-religious discrimination among Muslims in Scotland, with particular reference to those living in Edinburgh, during both everyday social interaction with the indigenous Scottish community, and contact with police and security officers. Discrimination against ethnic minorities in Scotland can be traced back in history; however, it is its post-9/11 multifaceted form that has particularly targeted Muslims qua Muslims in a global climate of distrust and stigmatization. While publicly available statistics show a decrease in racist incidents in Scotland, findings from other studies illustrate a more complex situation in which prejudice and discrimination intermingle in ways that make it hard to quantify the precise extent of anti-Muslim sentiment. Qualitative data collected specifically in Edinburgh suggest that Muslims’ hyper-visibility has triggered ethno-religious discrimination by some members of the non-Muslim majority. However, the daily experiences of life in Scotland, and the social relations with non-Muslims, are more heterogeneous and nuanced; they include overall positive views of, and a certain engagement with, many non-Muslims in a context of relative harmony. Contact with police and security officers at airports constitutes the main area of concern for Scottish Muslims, whose confidence, sense of equality and feelings of belonging to society are severely undermined by the securitization of their ethno-religious difference. The path towards a pluralistic Scottishness rests on sociopolitical and institutional efforts to reduce the discrimination against visible diversity, especially at loci of security, and to include the symbolic and physical distinctiveness of Muslimness within the porous Scottish cultural boundaries.

Tom Lawson’s book The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania is a timely historiographical intervention. It adroitly combines postcolonial criticism of Britain’s enduring imperial vanity with a c...

This article refers to:Germans, Hungarians and the Zigeunerkapelle: performing national enmity in late nineteenth-century Transylvania

Where are we beyond denial? This was the key question of a workshop that we organized at the University of Lancaster in March 2012. The question seemed as appropriate at the time as it is now. Afte...

ABSTRACTKasbarian and Öktem explore the extent to which ‘political friendships’ between Armenians, Turks and Kurds—members of communities antagonized by the traumatic experience of genocide—can subvert hegemonic power arrangements of denial and nationalist mobilization. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a group of Armenians and Turks in London, their paper explores how the members of this group experienced a transformation of their subject positions by facing each other's stories, gradually overcoming insecurities and fears of the Other. This dynamic process precipitated a shift of position, individually and collectively, enabling the formation of a community that acted beyond the confines of the reigning logics of nationalist projects. They argue that, in the relatively level playing field of the transnational, political and other friendships can develop to the point of becoming ‘moral communities’ that challenge established status quos and unequal power relations. Friendship and interpersonal relations that transgress these boundaries undermine reigning discourses and are, ultimately, political acts. However, these ‘low’ politics interactions still face the reality of ‘high’ politics, structured by the actions of an overbearing and semi-democratic Turkish state, the political expedience of third countries and a factious Armenian diaspora.

ABSTRACTUsing illustrations from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath, Baker argues that understanding popular music and public discourses about it can help to understand the dynamics of ethnopolitical conflict. Studies of war and conflict have approached music as political communication, as an object of securitization, as a means of violence and as a symbol of ethnic difference, while international law in the context of another case of collective violence, Rwanda, has even begun to question whether performing or broadcasting certain music could constitute incitement to genocide. Drawing on poststructuralist perspectives on the media and ethnicization in conflicts, Baker explores and interrogates the discourse of popular music as a weapon of war that was in use during and after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. Music during the Yugoslav wars was used as a tool of humiliation and violence in prison camps, and to provoke fear of the ethnic Other in line with a strategy of ethnic cleansing; it was also conceptualized as a morale-booster for the troops of one's own side. A discourse of music as a weapon of war was also in use and persisted after the war, when its referent was shifted to associate music-as-a-weapon not to the brave and defiant ingroup so much as the aggressive Other. This was then turned against a wider range of signifiers than those who had directly supported the Other's troops and had the effect of perpetuating ethnic separation and obstructing the reformation of a (post-)Yugoslav cultural space. Despite evidence that music did serve as an instrument of violence in the Yugoslav wars (and the precedent of the Bikindi indictment in Rwanda), Baker concludes that music should be integrated into understandings of ethnopolitical conflict not through a framework of incitement and complicity but with respect for the significance of music in the everyday.

In the contemporary world, music has been used for an ever-growing number of purposes, a process that has followed closely the evolution of humankind itself. As apparently the most comprehensive st...

ABSTRACTPlesch examines changing attitudes towards the gaucho as a musician in nineteenth-century Argentina through literary, musical and iconographic sources. She proposes the existence of a discursive formation gaucho, whose archive comprises travellers' writings, official reports, memoirs, visual arts, literature and music. Despised and persecuted throughout most of the nineteenth century, the gaucho was considered by Argentine elites as the epitome of ‘barbarism’, and his music was consistently described in derogatory terms. This attitude would be dramatically reversed towards the end of the century, when he was promoted to the role of national character and his cultural universe used as a source for the construction of a distinctive Argentine high culture that included the visual arts, literature and music. Plesch analyses the dominant discourse on the gaucho from colonial times to the publication of Martín Fierro (1872) and identifies four strategies of Othering at work: debasement, homogeneity, timelessness and Orientalism. They constitute, in the symbolic realm, the counterpart to the larger strategy of domination of the gaucho. In the second part of the article she examines the use of the gaucho and his world in the aesthetic production of Argentine cultural nationalism, isolating three key features: use, nostalgia and distancing. These are connected to the xenophobia unleashed by mass immigration and the modernization of the country, and the consequent need for elites to create a distinctive type of Argentine identity. The antithetical representations of the gaucho and his music, Plesch concludes, can only be understood in relation to the changing needs and political agendas of hegemonic society.