Albanian Commercial Musics and the Dilemmas of Representation

FAIN: FA-51858-05

Jane Cicely Sugarman
SUNY Research Foundation, Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY 11794-0001)

A book on the transnational Albanian commercial music industry and its role in the constitution of contemporary forms of Albanian identity, based on field research conducted in North America, Western Europe, and the former Yugoslavia. Contemporary Albanians long to integrate themselves into the high modernity of the West without losing a sense of themselves as a distinctive social group. The book will focus upon the dilemmas faced by Albanians, and indeed by many other communities outside the historic West, when they attempt to create cultural forms that are both locally distinctive and recognizeably "modern": dilemmas that I attribute to contradictory tendencies within the notion of modernity itself.