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To most of the outside world, Canadian culture appears to be a bipartite composition of unequal French and English elements, wherein francophones (all living in the province of Quebec) struggle to retain their unique cultural integrity and repel the hordes of anglophones who close them in on either side, or alternatively, in which French Canadians (all living in the province of Qu6bec) insist on special treatment and make unreasonable demands which hardworking English Canadians are obliged to subsidize. These views are opposed to one another, but-like many debates of this nature-are inextricably linked in that they hinge on an either/or notion of Canadian-ness, one which oversimplifies the realities of a complex situation. For my purposes here, the most significant flaw in the Anglo vs. Franco model is that it reduces the enormous diversity of Canada to two factions, overlooking the experiences of immigrants who have contributed so much to the cultural fabric of the country. Even a scholar as perspicacious as George Lipsitz writes of Canada that the Quebecois are "six million people surrounded by more than two hundred million English speakers" (147), although elsewhere in his landmark book Dangerous Crossroads, he notes that Toronto has a South Asian community large enough to be a significant fan base for bhangra artist Apache Indian (15). Toronto is also home to Desi1 Records, a small record label devoted to music by and for the children of South Asian immigrants, and an important part of the community created by these youth, for whom bhangra and related dance musics are central to negotiating the complexities of their cultural and generational identities.
Bhangra is the contemporary popular music of South Asian youth raised in the diaspora; it developed in Indian enclaves of British cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and London(Southall) during the 1980s, but it draws on elements as disparate as the Punjabi folk genre whose name it shares, the songs of popular Hindi movies, and other diasporic dance musics such as reggae, hip hop, and drum & bass. At the same time, the term bhangra continues to describe a folk music of rural, agricultural Punjab, where songs are performed and danced to by men to the accompaniment of the dhol or dholki drums. In this setting, bhangra is primarily...