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Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. By Carol Silverman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 398, figures and charts, acknowledgments, notes on transliteration, about the companion website, notes, references, index.)
Romani Routes examines Balkan Romani music making in diaspora as complex practices that negotiate Romani identity and social relations in contexts of racial prejudice, global capitalism, and transnational migrations. The book discusses how the discrimination the Roma experience in Europe, and face as immigrants in the United States, has impacted their music. Always combining her "thick description" and analysis of Romani music performances, styles, and genres with a discussion of the marginalization and oppression that Romani people have endured historically, Carol Silverman makes a long overdue and important contribution to a wide range of fields, including folklore studies, Romani studies, performance studies, ethnology, anthropology, and music.
This rich ethnographic study focuses on the Balkan Romani diaspora in the Bronx, New York, as well as its Macedonian and Bulgarian connections. It is informed by four decades of fieldwork that Silverman conducted with Ro- mani communities in the United States, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Her research involved participant observation of Romani musicians' everyday lives both in diaspora and at home in the Balkans, music festivals and performances, and Romani rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as interviews conducted with her Romani participants. Silverman learned to speak several Romani dialects, sang Balkan and Romani music, and performed and recorded CDs with a Bronx Romani band. She also analyzed media representations of Romani musicians and, most recently, videos, television programs, and YouTube postings of community and family events and commentaries.
Theoretically sophisticated, Romani Routes adopts an eclectic approach and engages with concepts of hybridity, authenticity, identity, performance...