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Abstract
This dissertation explores the cross-cultural performance practices of the South Asian-American diaspora to theorize hyphenation as a cultural identity, creative process, and artistic product that stages a reciprocal dialogue between musical communities and genres. Focusing primarily on Indo-jazz fusion in New York City, I discuss the imbrication of Carnatic, Hindustani, and jazz aesthetics from both technical and sociocultural perspectives, analyzing the mechanics of cross-cultural collaboration and the practical considerations that go into communicating across genre lines as well as the implications these collaborations have for the formation of diasporic identity and cross-cultural community. Along the way, I interrogate mainstream ethnomusicological definitions of various South Asian musical concepts, offering an emic, performance-based perspective that emphasizes the ways these concepts are deployed in both traditional and cross-cultural contexts. Ultimately, I posit “hyphenation” as alternately an ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological construct. It describes, first, a transnational South Asianness that finds its complete expression only at the intersection of multiple competing national, ethnic, and cultural identities; second, a form of musical cognition and analysis, born of the genre-defying multiplicity endemic to the performance of traditional art in a transnational context; and third, a uniquely diasporic process of music-making that generates new meanings and new understandings of South Asianness through the act of cross-cultural translation, meanings that may account for the unwieldy global manifestations of fusion as an aesthetic genre. Chapter One interrogates the affordances and problematics of interracial performance on the one hand, and the intrinsic sense of race-based authenticity that accompanies South Asian practitioners of the traditional arts on the other. I argue that this question of authenticity generates a productive anxiety in white practitioners of South Asian music, ultimately leading them to perform their whiteness differently before the brown gaze. Chapter Two deploys hyphenation as a mode of theoretical analysis, asking what it means to treat the cross-cultural competence central to hyphenated artistic performance as a criterion for aesthetic evaluation. Chapter Three analyzes the artistic processes that go into communicating across genre lines as well as the sociomusical factors that shape this communication, emphasizing metaphors of language, conversation, translation, and speech to posit the cross-genre jam session as a space of productive dialogue and, ideally, mutual understanding. These chapters are separated by two short interludes, or thukkadas, in which I explore case studies that exemplify hyphenation as a music theoretical framework.