Jason Toynbee

Byron Dueck

Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on ‘world music’ questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre – but says relatively little about migration and mobility – diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music. In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals – and even exceeds – literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms. This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.

Migrating Music

Sheds new light on issues such as Marley's contribution as a musician and public intellectual, how he was granted access to the global media system, and what his music means in cultural and political terms.

Herald of a Postcolonial World?

Bob Marley

Migrants bring music from the homeland to the metropolis. But music also migrates via the media: ‘world’ music, hip hop, bossa nova ... . With case studies from across the world this ground-breaking collection shows how migrating music is key to the construction of a still-emerging, global cosmopolitan imagination.

David Hesmondhalgh

Media studies needs richer and livelier intellectual resources. This book brings together major and emerging international media analysts to consider key processes of media change, using a number of critical perspectives. Case studies range from reality television to professional journalism, from blogging to control of copyright, from social networking sites to indigenous media, in Europe, North America, Asia and elsewhere. Among the theoretical approaches and issues addressed are: critical realism post-structuralist approaches to media and culture Pierre Bourdieu and field theory public sphere theory – including post-Habermasian versions actor network theory Marxist and post-Marxist theories, including contemporary critical theory theories of democracy, antagonism and difference. This volume is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers of cultural studies, media studies and social theory.

The Media and Social Theory

Is Bob Marley the only third world superstar? How did he achieve this unique status? In this captivating new study of one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, Jason Toynbee sheds new light on issues such as Marley’s contribution as a musician and public intellectual, how he was granted access to the global media system, and what his music means in cultural and political terms. Tracing Marley’s life and work from Jamaica to the world stage, Toynbee suggests that we need to understand Marley first and foremost as a ‘social author’. Trained in the co-operative yet also highly competitive musical laboratory of downtown Kingston, Marley went on to translate reggae into a successful international style. His crowning achievement was to mix postcolonial anger and hope with Jamaican textures and beats to produce the first world music. However the period since his death has been marked by brutal and intensifying inequality in the capitalist world system. There is an urgent need, then, to reconsider the nature of his legacy. Toynbee does this in the concluding chapters, weighing Marley’s impact as advocate of human emancipation against his marginalisation as a ‘Natural Mystic’ and pretext for disengagement from radical politics.

Jason Toynbee

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