Musicology does not want for titles that speak of the global order, of space, place, and identity, of the local and the national – but the postnational marks a relatively new departure. The editors seek not to herald the downfall of the nation, but instead to contest whether the boundaries of the nation are the most useful way to delimit an imagined audience or to understand the performance of identity through music. Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid's introductory chapter traces the growing importance of geographical markers in the production, distribution, and marketing of music, from the use of ‘world sounds’ in progressive music through the development of the marketing category ‘world music’ to the urban and global lounge. Corona and Madrid's work seeks to problematize attempts to ascribe a universal criterion of value and significance to such music. Music, they argue, is understood at the nexus of production, distribution, performance, and consumption. Their call for a careful contextualization of music emerges out of a strong belief that musical meaning arises out of contingent practices including performance, location, and sociocultural context. The postnational, they conclude, is an effective context for understanding music today, at a time when (as Martin Stokes suggested several years ago) ideas, cultures, and identities can no longer be unproblematically and securely held in place by the boundaries of the nation-state.Footnote ¹

Although the uninitiated reader may resurface from the opening chapter without a clear definition of the postnational, Arved Ashby's chapter (the second in the volume) does not shy away from setting out concisely what it means to him: it

On the basis of such a definition, the recent growth of Eurovision studies within musicology might be classified as a postnational endeavour, in that it examines the way in which musical groups imagine audiences that mediate between national and European identities, as well as investigating the fraught year-long competitions that have served to both validate and refuse the right of particular ethnic and linguistic groups to represent the nation – a case in point being Spain's 1968 winning song ‘La, La, La’ by Joan Manuel Serrat, who was barred from performing in Catalan during the final competition; the winner Massiel sang the same song in Castilian.

Ashby's chapter forms part of the first section of Postnational Musical Identities, which elaborates a theoretical discussion of postnational issues. He discusses the importance of studies of the Austro-German canon in establishing the centrality of absolute music and the development of methodological tools to analyse and valorize it. The study of this music defined the shape of musicology and its tools, and remained largely unchanged into the 1970s and beyond. This foundation for American musicology, Ashby argues, has resulted in a strongly nationalist bias. This bias gives value to an Austro-German absolute music above all others, using methodologies which, when transposed to the discussion of musical consumption, non-notated musics, performance, popular musics, non-Austro-German music, and other areas besides, leave musicologists struggling to demonstrate any relative worth to their study. If this debate is already familiar to many musicologists, the second half of Ashby's article is distinctive for its investigation of a paranoid, one-dimensional nationalism that has prevailed following 9/11, infecting musicology in the form of historicism. His call for a reuniting of the political and the aesthetic dimensions of musicology realized through postnationalism is thoughtfully made and worthy of careful study.

Following this theoretical opening the rest of the book is largely focused on the Americas, working through transnational Caribbean and US–Mexican relations before a final excursus into areas of South America. Inevitably, the book is thus dominated by Hispanic and Lusophone analyses, and popular musics form the mainstay of these discussions. The editors have clearly found that as popular music is, quite literally, music of the people, then issues of identity formation can be more effectively played out in such music. As a result, the final chapter in the theoretical introductory section sits rather awkwardly, as it is concerned with East–West relations, the reception of Tōru Takemitsu's November Steps by an American public, and John Cage's potentially orientalist approach to composition using elements from Asian cultures. Unusual in its focus on experimental rather than popular musics, on Asian-American identities, and on composer-centred work, it is also an interesting snapshot for those unfamiliar with instruments such as the biwa or the shakuhachi.

Reaching the second section of the book, ‘A Transnational Caribbean’, readers might be inclined to ask whether ‘Transnational Musical Identities’ might not have been a more effective title for many of the concerns raised in the chapters that follow. Chapters by Daniel Party (‘The Miamization of Latin-American Pop Music’), Helena Simonett (‘Quest for the Local: Building Musical Ties between Mexico and the United States’), Steven Loza (‘Assimilation, Reclamation, and Rejection of the Nation-State Chicano Musicians’), Greg Schelonka (‘RockIn’ la Frontera: Mexican Rock, Globalization, and National Identity'), and Christopher Dennis (‘The “Afro-Colombianization” of Hip-Hop and Discourses on Authenticity’) focus on relationships between two nations or between the USA and a particular migrant group, often seeking to contest narrow views of nationhood and belonging through music. Rather than moving beyond the notion of the nation, these chapters focus on relationships between two groups defined by labels such as ‘American’, ‘Chilean’, ‘Colombian’, and ‘Mexican’. For readers interested in US–Mexican musical identities the third section of the book is particularly strong. Simonett's chapter is a carefully referenced and clearly written introduction to cross-border relations, particularly useful for those unfamiliar with technobanda, sonido, or other recent musical developments. Loza and Schelonka both address issues faced by Mexican-American communities, facing head-on the often difficult relations between migrant groups and their evolving attitudes towards their host nation.

Loza's chapter is a three-part history of Chicano attitudes and reactions to living in and performing in the USA, suggesting that while first generation migrants sought to assimilate their music into the American rock scene, recent changes have meant that both young and old Chicano musicians have sought to articulate and appeal to a clearly Mexican-American audience, in an attempt to reclaim and protest the importance of the Chicano population in the USA. Although this chapter seems to explode out of the boundaries of the twelve pages it is allocated (ending with a numbered list of challenges to a legitimate Mexican identity in the States), it remains a strongly worded retort to the apparent institutionalization of American nationalism seen through a reading of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's book Who Are We? Footnote ² Extracts from this book (and, I suspect, indignation at its claims) will probably resonate with those working against narrow definitions of nationalism across the world, including, as I write, in debates on multiculturalism in Britain. Loza's identification of a protest trend in groups such as Rage Against the Machine, Aztlán Underground, and Ozomatli responds to sentiments such as that expressed by Huntington's bald statement: ‘There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream, in that society only if they dream in English’ (cited on 146–7). Although Loza's chapter arises out of his study of Chicano-American relations, it has wider ramifications for anyone trying to study and come to terms with nationalisms that refuse persistently to take account of even significant multicultural communities.

Schelonka's chapter develops this line of argument, focusing on protest and resistance music within Mexican-American communities against a growing trend of paranoia and hatred towards those who refuse to conform to the ideals of a now-outdated American dream founded on white Protestant values. Just as Ashby promotes postnationalism as a more helpful way of coping with a post-9/11 historicism, so Schelonka posits a more complex understanding of Mexican-American identities that cannot be served by differing attempts to contain such identities within the boundaries of the nation-state. The remaining chapter in this section, written by the editors, is a careful deconstruction of the tequila, sexo, marijuana y mariachi image of Tijuana, a pivotal border location that has spawned Nor-tec music. Corona and Madrid's work is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most effective attempts to understand what the postnational means to music, tracing the successes and failures of Nor-tec across the Atlantic by positioning it at once in Mexico and within the field of European electronica. In ‘Ideology, Flux, and Identity in Tijuana's Nor-tec Music’, the city's role as a liminal, marginal space enables Corona and Madrid to theorize Nor-tec's significance on local, regional, national, and supranational levels, destabilizing any attempts to reify identity through a composer-focused approach.

The role developing technologies play in creating and developing a Nor-tec sound refocuses attention on the role of production and distribution. Music has rarely observed national borders, and the public broadcast of music frequently crosses administrative boundaries whether or not it has been authorized to do so. Strangely, few chapters in this book explore the possibilities of the internet in creating networks of music and listeners that transcend and move beyond the local or national level. Perhaps in part this is because of the economic profiles of many of the artists and audiences featured in this book, something that is most apparent in Dennis's chapter ‘The “Afro-Colombianization” of Hip-Hop’, which examines the importance of US hip-hop culture for Colombian youth from the late 1980s, discussing the role played by technology (reliance on the homemade tape or CD) and bootlegged copies in developing an awareness of US culture and creating a homegrown network for Colombian hip-hop artists. He focuses on the difficulties of articulating and responding to an Afro-Colombian and a mestizo youth. The final chapter in the volume, ‘Transnational Soundscapes: Ambient Music and Bossatrônica’, is indebted to the role of the internet in developing a global-urban soundscape. In discussing the recycling of bossa nova through electronic means, Denilson Lopes's work also shifts the focus to an Anglo-American ambient sound. Lopes's work is indebted to Josh Kun's Audiotopia, though it is less successful in understanding the limits of technological networks and those to whom they are available.Footnote ³ More careful postnational work is needed in the area of imagined communities that coalesce on the internet, whether they involve groups at a subnational level, such as Basque or Catalan, or such phenomena as the growth in popularity of Celtic musics, which often resist attempts to contain them within national boundaries.

Lopes's chapter underlines one of the strongest themes that runs through Postnational Musical Identities. Nostalgia, whether for an era when the national could be envisaged (at least through hegemonic discourse) as a cohesive imagined community or as a strong means of self-identification in migrant communities, seems to perform a particularly important function in our understanding of the postnational. This is articulated with particular deftness by Vanessa Knights, whose work on Puerto-Rican bolero and Nuyorican poetry draws strength from Stuart Hall's observation that it is routes not roots that are key to understanding identity. Unlike the other chapter in this section (Daniel Party's on Miamization), Knights's work is carefully referenced and contextualized with historical specificities. She allows for (indeed traces effectively) historical trajectories and permits personal routes and variations, acknowledging the importance of the passage of time on both the creation of and the response to Puerto Rican boleros and Nuyorican poetry. The strength of Knights's research on postnational music and identity makes this one of the most effective chapters; the book is dedicated to Knights, who died in 2007.

It is at times difficult to identify why the postnational per se is of particular unifying importance to this book, and how the volume might be distinguished in focus from Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights's recent publication Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location.Footnote ⁴ This latter book, also strongly influenced by Arjun Appadurai's work on modernity, transnationalism, and diasporas, is more careful to articulate a position for itself vis-à-vis the importance of finding a place for the national today. Although predicated on an understanding of the nation-state as contantly in flux, as contested and contestable, the Biddle and Knights volume is more effective in creating a powerful argument for reclaiming the national amidst the highly polarized debates surrounding the global and the local. Part of this, I believe, results from the ‘sandwich structure’ they chose, with a lengthy and wide-ranging introduction and a multi-authored central section, followed by an afterword which serves to bring together the threads of the book but equally to open up questions for future study: are we moving towards a postnational musicology? How might this postnational musicology be articulated, not only in terms of race, ethnicity, and diaspora, but also in terms of class? (Cristina Magaldi's ‘Before and after Samba’ is the only chapter in Postnational Musical Identities to foreground this.) Is ‘postnational critique’ possible, just as feminist, structuralist, or postcolonial readings of music have now become a significant part of musicology? What would postnationalism look like, not only in parts of the world where boundaries can be drawn on a map in black and white, but in other places such as Palestine and Israel, or Pakistan and India?

One of the strengths of Postnational Musical Identities is its ability to draw on the expertise of academics from a variety of disciplines, including Hispanic and Lusophone studies, music, history, and comparative cultural studies. The editors' professed desire for true interdisciplinarity is largely a fertile and effective one. Some musicologists may find the complete absence of ‘music examples’ frustrating, but until the field of music is able to find a way of surmounting these notational and terminological hurdles, musicology will struggle to have both plagal cadences and a true interdisciplinary reach – something will have to be lost. The desire to avoid the ‘ghettoization’ of music by removing the barrier of staff notation is reciprocated by the linguists in this book, who provide full translations of any Spanish, Portuguese, or Nahuatl text that is relevant to each chapter. My only significant criticism of this book lies in certain editorial decisions and practices. The introductory chapter might do better to point the reader more carefully towards the content of the book's main body: references to individual chapters are so fleeting that they appear as an afterthought. The book could also have done with some stringent copy-editing, as it abounds with typographical errors and sentences that are sloppily replicated, at times appearing at the bottom of one page and again at the top of the next. Slavoj Žižek's only appearance, for instance, is mysteriously doubled (103) when a fragment of text anticipates its logical appearance, pasted into the middle of an otherwise coherent sentence. Editorial problems aside, however, this book is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of work that seeks to re-situate new configurations of the national amidst a reductive debate in musicology which has too often become unhelpfully polarized between the global and the local.