Musical Minorities is the first English-language monograph on the performing arts of an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Living primarily in the northern mountains, the Hmong have strategically maintained their cultural distance from foreign invaders and encroaching state agencies for almost two centuries. They use cultural heritage as a means of maintaining a resilient community identity, one which is malleable to their everyday needs and to negotiations among themselves and with others in the vicinity. Case studies of revolutionary songs, countercultural rock, traditional vocal and instrumental styles, tourist shows, animist and Christian rituals, and light pop from the diaspora illustrate the diversity of their creative outputs. This groundbreaking study reveals how performing arts shape understandings of ethnicity and nationality in contemporary Vietnam. Based on three years of fieldwork, Lonán Ó Briain traces the circulation of organized sounds that contribute to the adaptive capacities of this diverse social group. In an original investigation of the sonic materialization of social identity, the book outlines the full multiplicity of Hmong music-making through a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a post-socialist context.

Musical Minorities is the first English-language monograph on the performing arts of an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Living primarily in the northern mountains, the Hmong have strategically maintained their cultural distance from foreign invaders and encroaching state agencies for almost two centuries. They use cultural heritage as a means of maintaining a resilient community identity, one which is malleable to their everyday needs and to negotiations among themselves and with others in the vicinity. Case studies of revolutionary songs, countercultural rock, traditional vocal and instrumental styles, tourist shows, animist and Christian rituals, and light pop from the diaspora illustrate the diversity of their creative outputs. This groundbreaking study reveals how performing arts shape understandings of ethnicity and nationality in contemporary Vietnam. Based on three years of fieldwork, Lon n Briain traces the circulation of organized sounds that contribute to the adaptive capacities of this diverse social group. In an original investigation of the sonic materialization of social identity, the book outlines the full multiplicity of Hmong music-making through a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a post-socialist context.

The acceleration of mobility among the worlds peoples, the growth of populations resettling in places other than their homelands, and world events that have propelled these developments have brought minorities unprecedented attention. Their significance as subjects for study has grown correspondingly and the study of their music has become an important gateway into understanding the culture of minorities.

The African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music.

The first English-language book-length treatment of the music of an ethnic minority in Vietnam, Musical Minorities examines how musical sounds shape understandings of social identity, providing a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a post-socialist context.

What can music say about group specifics, especially the specifics of ethnic minorities? In this volume, the focus is on one distinctive aspect of minority culture – collective memory. This is not an imprint of the past: it arises as an image, created from the motives of the past, but shaped by the needs and interests of the present, and various actors participate in its creation. If the medium of remembrance is music – a powerful medium which, thanks to its polysemantic character, makes it possible to connect the individual and the collective, to represent communities, and to rewrite group boundaries – who are the actors and what images do they create? The book Music – Memory – Minorities: Between Archive and Activism focuses on the musical remembrance of Roma and Jews. In addition to exploring individual cases, the text presents and follows a remarkable arc that allows us to observe the role of music in the ethno-emancipatory process of minorities.

In clear and elegant prose, Music of the Common Tongue, first published in 1987, argues that by any reasonable reckoning of the function of music in human life the African American tradition, that which stems from the collision between African and European ways of doing music which occurred in the Americas and the Caribbean during and after slavery, is the major western music of the twentieth century. In showing why this is so, the author presents not only an account of African American music from its origins but also a more general consideration of the nature of the music act and of its function in human life. The two streams of discussion occupy alternate chapters so that each casts light on the other. The author offers also an answer to what the Musical Times called the "seldom posed though glaringly obtrusive" question: "why is it that the music of an alienated, oppressed, often persecuted black minority should have made so powerful an impact on the entire industrialized world, whatever the color of its skin or economic status?"