The Power to Transgress: Music across Borders - Introduction

This issue of Anglistica, is the first dedicated to music in the long commitment of this journal to cultural studies and interdisciplinarity. Music here features first of all as a topic of study, a human activity with multiple social and cultural resonances; it also works as an access point to issues such as diasporic identities, subaltern writing, and contrapuntal reading of hegemonic narratives. Music is here considered as a peculiar human activity whose medium is sound, an “organization of noise” (Jacques Attali), which also works as site of resistance for subjects singing and playing from the margins of Western modernity. Following a strong commitment in the methodology of cultural studies, all the essays included here focus on the ability of a given genre, artist or performance to ‘give voice’ to marginal or eccentric subjects who live and elaborate the world ‘across borders’ – state borders as well as less tangible borders between metropolis and periphery, power and resistance, hegemony and subalternity.