Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora by Carol Silverman (review)

Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Carol Silverman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.398 pp., companion website. isbn 978-0-19-530094-9 (cloth); 978-0-19-983278-1 (website).The contribution of Romani musicians to the history and performance practice of Balkan musical styles is so critical that it is virtually impossible to understand, teach, or perform such music without acknowledging their intrinsic impact. Yet since their migration into the Balkans in circa 1400, these same artists, together with their fellow community members, have been regularly subjected to oppression, marginalization, harassment, and other forms of social abuse. Carol Silverman s comprehensive and long-awaited study, rooted in intensive, continuous ethnographic field work among Romani communities in North America and Europe over nearly three decades, exposes the multifaceted politics of discourse that have pervaded Balkan Romani musicianship during and following the socialist era. A highly respected anthropologist and folklorist with many years experience as a singer of Balkan and Romani vocal genres and activist on behalf of Romani causes, Silverman demonstrates how these discursive politics (evident in popular attitudes and behaviors, film and video imagery, narratives scholarly and anecdotal, governmental policies, festival ads and concert programming, audience expectations and media responses, and more) are situated in and informed by an appalling, enduring legacy of (sometimes militant) discrimination and changing social inequalities, and a transnational political economy of eastern European and world music production that has typically feasted upon or otherwise preferred to market essentialized, often orientalist representations of Romani lifeways in the guise of the exotic Gypsy. However, rather than portraying Romani musicians as passive or uninformed victims of exploitation, Silverman shows how they have pragmatically participated in and mediated their own representations, operating, together with their non-Romani artistic managers and producers, as culture brokers concerned doubly with ideological and economic incentives, with education and entertainment, or with opportunities for activism and financial advancement through performances on the world music festival stage, video screen, and audio recording.Although grounded largely in New York City, Silverman s analysis derives from multi-sited, multi-lingual (BCS, Bulgarian, English, Macedonian, Romani) ethnographic research among Roma with ties to Bulgaria or Macedonia but residing there or elsewhere. Musicians from two communities of Macedonian Roma and various Bulgarian locales are the central characters of her narrative. The Macedonian sites include New York City's Belmont neighborhood, in the Bronx, and Suto Orizari, or Sutka, the large Romani community found on Skopje's outskirts. Silverman began traveling to Bulgaria in 1972 and working actively with Roma there in the 1980s; however, after 1989, when prominent Romani (and non-Romani) musicians from both Macedonia and Bulgaria began emigrating to the United States (especially NYC), Canada (Toronto), Australia (Melbourne), or elsewhere and concertizing throughout the world, Silverman's ethnographic "field" became similarly transnational and mobile, tracking the musicians and their artistry as their life paths spun out in new, manifold directions. Indeed, while approaches to performance and performativity anchor Silverman's theoretical orientation, diaspora and global studies scholarship, together with a sensitivity to the politics of gender, representation, authority, and other power relations, occupies a critical place in her analysis.The book's thirteen chapters are organized in four sections whose thematic disposition underscores key topics and concepts. Part I supplies an introduction to Balkan Romani culture, history, and musical genres, considers the historical development of professional Romani musicianship, and illustrates how thinking about Romani society complicates prevailing understandings of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and hybridity. …