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Timothy D. Taylor. 200 . Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Reviewed by Nabeel Zuberi
This book reminds us how the creation, sound, and consumption of music-as well as the ways in which we produce located knowledges about music-are shaped by power relations with long histories. The regimes through which "the West" dominates, represents, and incorporates its "Others" lie at the heart of Timothy D. Taylor's intellectual project. Taylor is a professor of ethnomusicology and musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Positioned within and between two disciplinary formations, Beyond Exoticism is the follow-up to the excellent Strange Sounds (2001), which focused on the role of technology in the construction of musical imaginaries since World War II. As Taylor showed in that book, analogue and digital technologies have mobilized the tropes of exploration, and generated a host of fascinations with subjects and spaces beyond the physical and psychic borders of an imaginary West. To borrow a term from the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the West is a "desiring machine" that needs Others in order to define the contours of its own identity and subjectivities. The ordering of that relationship between Self and Other is one of the central threads that runs through the weave of Beyond Exoticism. Taylor himself suggests that this new book is more closely aligned with his earlier Global Pop (1997), written at the moment that "world music" had secured its place as a market category in the local megastore. Some of that book's emphasis on globalization discourse through case studies of particular musicians and their recordings informs the approach of Beyond Exoticism. But this project has a broader ambit, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present, beginning with the rise of tonality and opera and ending with world music in television advertising. The historical durée is periodized in terms of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, and Taylor stresses continuities as well as cultural and ideological shifts in Western music's engagement with the rest of the world.
Before addressing the scope of his argument, some of its finer points, and possible limitations, it is important to acknowledge that Taylor deftly combines lucidity and nuance in a work of such breadth. Beyond...