zyx zyxw zyxwvutsr TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture 3 ESSAYS Tra nceGIobaINation: 0rientaIism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture Sunaina Maira zyxwvut University of Massachusetts, Amherst Prologue: Betrayals Most writings on rave culture or the so-called Ecstasy generation, it seems, begin with some kind of confessional or include at a critical point in the narrative a testimonial, of the nature of I-was-there-and-I-did-it-too. There seems to be a latent ethnographic or even voyeuristic impulse underlying these revelations, an attempt to offer the reader a glimpse into the sensory experience and temporal rhythms of club culture by describing the unfolding of a night out partying with youth in London, in Ben Malbon’s Clubbing (1999), or possibly to support the ethnographic authority of the (older) researcher in Sarah Thornton’s account of rolling on E in Club Cultures (1996). This paper does not include a standard confessional; however, underlying my research is a question about betrayal, or perhaps the risk of betrayal-not because of an anxiety about communicating an “empirical truth” gleaned from “being there” but rather, due to the risk of mis-translating the sensory, embodied experience of electronic music and dance culture into a medium that is unable to convey its rhythms and pleasures, of betraying the textures of the music and dance and the investments in it of the young people I interviewed. What I have been concerned with in this study is that I risk betraying my subjects. In Kamala Visweswaran’s thoughtful essay on doing feminist, selfreflexive ethnography, “Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts” (1994), betrayal is revealed to be always multiple and layered, concealing more than one conflict of interest. So, also, in this project I risk betraying my personal interest in electronic music, as someone who grew up with the sounds of ’80s club culture; the reflexivity inherent in cultural studies work notwithstanding, I find myself experiencing a different kind of investment in this subculture because, for the first time in my research on youth culture, I really like the music and have a personal history associated with it, or at least with particular sub-genres. ‘ Questions about methodology and 4 -. Sunaina Maira ~ ~- ~ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA zy reflexivity also became particularly acute in this study because I developed a liking for the young people I interviewed, and a respect for their thoughtfulness, generosity, and caring. At the same time, in our conversations, I risked betraying the inauthenticity of the Asian origins of the music and shattering their beliefs in electronic trance music as a genre with Indian roots. These tensions in telling various genealogies of the music will become apparent later, but I want to note that while the notion of betrayal implies a prior allegiance, the commitments revealed in this study were not clear-cut or a priori, but shifted during my project, as I listened to these stories and began listening to new beats. Introduction: Electronic Music in the Happy Valley Electronic dance music is a large and continually expanding musical genre and dance subculture, having evolved from Detroit techno, Chicago house, and New York garage/disco parties as well as European electronic music experiments, notably in Germany. I cannot provide a comprehensive history of this musical genealogy here but many others have written about it in some depth (Collin, 1997; McLeod, 2001; Reynolds, 1998; Shapiro, 2000; Silcott, 1999). In very brief, the story of raves begins, most recently at least, in England where Chicago house music was transformed by clubbers in the 1980s into what was called acid-house, an Ecstasy-driven, all-night dance culture (Thornton, 1996). An important role was played by British tourists in Ibiza, Spain-on party circuits that would later include India, Nepal, and Thailand- who helped import a particular casual and communal club ethos and style which flowered in London in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Travel is a key motif in this subculture, leading to the emphasis on mobility and a global imaginary in this paper, because it has always been at the heart of the evolution and narration of raves. As these parties caught the imagination of marginalized or underemployed youth in Thatcher’s Britain, caravans of techno-travelers began holding enormous festivals with mobile sound-systems in the English countryside, to the consternation of police and state authorities (Collin, 1997). Rave culture has since its inception been in tension with the law over the uses of public space and meanings of citizenship-and the very notion of youth itself. Transnational travel and cultural globalization continues to thread itself into the story of rave culture’s entry into the U.S. Although Ecstasy parties were already happening in Texas before the drug, MDMA, was declared illegal in 1984, the first full-blown raves on the East Coast were zyxwvu TranceClobalNation:Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism,and Citizenship in Youth Culture 5 hosted by deejay Frankie Bones in Brooklyn in 1989 after he attended house parties in Britain (Champion, 1997; Reynolds, 1999, p. 144). On the West Coast, a group of British expatriates who drew on the “techno-pagan strand” of British raves began the Full Moon parties on Northern California beaches and the Come-Unity parties in the Bay Area, offering a cyberhippie consciousness through a vision of dance as ritual and the DJ as “digital shaman” (Silcott, pp. 58-59; Reynolds, p. 156). In Southern California, British expatriates jumpstarted a party culture that mutated into its local manifestation of outlandishly spectacular and highly fashion-conscious events, some held in the desert; at least in the early ’~OS, these were reportedly unusually racially mixed parties (Prince and Roberts, 200 1; Reynolds, 1999, pp. 159-160). In Western Massachusetts, where this work in progress is situated, there are very few raves compared to urban centers in San Francisco, New York, Orlando, and the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area. Yet there seems to be a community of “party kids” in the NorthamptodAmherst area who travel to raves up and down the East Coast; this is not surprising given the large college population attending institutions such as the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Smith College and also the demographic makeup of the region, for electronic dance music is a largely white, middle-class youth subculture. The “Happy Valley” of Western Massachusetts, as the area is called with equal measures of affection and derision, has a predominantly white population with a very visible neo-hippie culture. Debates about the area’s cultural identity are fraught, both by the politics of liberal multiculturalism-and its limits-and by the ongoing conflict over gentrification, particularly apparent in Northampton. Focusing on rave culture in the Valley is interesting because it raises questions about how to conceptualize the links between “local” communities and “global” imaginaries-particularly racialized or Orientalist imaginaries-and helps rethink the notion of youth subcultures in an era of transnational flows of people, commodities, capital, and media and the accompanying conflicts over immigration, national identity, and class mobility. I first became interested in global dance music when I heard of Goa trance, a subgenre of this musicisubculture which was transplanted to the U.S. by ravers from Israel and France who began flocking to “Goa parties” in New York in the mid-to late 1990s. Initially, I was intrigued by what seemed like a performance of a late twentieth-century Orientalist fantasy; this was a moment in U.S. popular culture when South Asian motifs and music became particularly visible in the latest manifestation of “Asian zyx zy 6 zy zyxwvut Sunaina Maira cool,” from henna “tattoos” and decorative “bindi jewels” to images of Hindu deities on T-shirts and lunch boxes.* Asian icons are often used by white ( or other) American youth to distinguish themselves as being “alternative” with respect to mainstream popular culture, as is the case in neohippie subcultures that reinvent the sixties’ fascination with India. During the course of this research, however, my own understandings of Orientalism in practice, particularly in the context of globalization, became more layered due to the insights of the youth I interviewed. My conversations with local party kids, deejays, and producers in Western Massachusetts were very rich and covered a range of issues, so I draw on the musical model of this digitally produced music in offering a preliminary analysis, conceiving of my samples from the interview narratives as layered into two tracks: one, the theme of technology, modernity, and Orientalism; and two, tensions of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and gender.3 These tracks flow over the breakbeat rhythms that are the constitutive elements of this music-my fundamental question about the notion of global citizenship in youth culture; in fact, this multi-layered structure models that of Goa trance itself. I begin with a reflection on trance as youth subculture that, like a section of beats, will be looped into the thematic explorations that follow. Trance as Youth Subculture zyxwv Simon Reynolds, ubiquitous critic of electronic dance music, calls trance music “the Esperanto of electronic dance music,” claiming that it was, in the late 1990s, the most popular rave sound in the world.” Trance is growing in appeal in the U.S. and, according to Reynolds, offers a “populist, accessible alternative to the experimental abstraction of hip rave styles such as techno and drum and bass” (1998, no page). Trance has a more melodic sound, within the spectrum of electronic music subgenres, characterized by what Reynolds calls “recognizably human emotions and a warmly devotional aura.” Goa trance is the faster, “fiercer” version of trance music (140 bpm and up), first popularized by raver-tourists recreating the Ibiza paradise on the beaches of Goa, India-historically a sixties hippie haven-and later circulating as a “viral, ‘virtual’ presence across the Western world” (Reynolds, 1999, pp. 175-176). DJ Kalyx is one of the young owners of The Grow Room, an electronic music store in Amherst that sells vinyl as well as dancewear and that has become a meeting spot for (aspiring) deejays and party kids. Kalyx spins trance at parties in Cambridge and New York and observed that Goa trance itself has frag- TranceGlobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture 7 mented, with many local variations in sound and tempo across the various sites it is produced; at the same time, he noted that “music is becoming wall-less,” pointing out that out his own store has many different kinds of labels for categories of electronic music “because music is always borrowing different ideas.” Gavin, a producer of trance parties in Amherst and New York, describes Goa trance as the traditional label, now interchangeable with “psychedelic trance” (or psy-trance), for a sound that has an “arpeggiated synth-line” and is “very chaotic,” with “lots of sounds and noises moving in and out of each other,” what Reynolds calls “mandalaswirls of sound” (1999, p. 176). The mystical imagery is not coincidental: Goa parties have a “cyberdelic” aura, or what Kalyx calls a “super-tribal” vibe, with images of Hindu gods and symbols forming the standard visual iconography of psytrance fliers. The parties do not use strobe light or traditional shadowy club lighting but ultra-violet or “black” light, that reflects off the dancers’ fluorescent clothing. Women often dress in “retro-hippie” or “ethnic” clothes and wear nose rings or bindis, the Indian forehead ornament (Reynolds, 2000, p. 108). DJ IndiaDrop, who spins Goa trance at a “Synthetic Sadhu” rave in New York organized by a French expatriate, says, “We try to recreate what it’s like to be in India, which is the most spiritual place on the planet”; “Goa” in this scene, Naresh Fernandes observes, “connotes a nongeographical destination that’s everything the rational West isn’t’’ (Fernandes, 2000). Ravers and promoters alike suggest that a particular Orientalist, or at least spiritual, overtone was key to Goa trance’s emergence in the U.S., connected to the return to house in dance music in recent years and the fringe status of psy-trance within rave culture. Hien, a young Vietnamese American man who grew up in Worcester and has been going to dance parties for several years, offered an astute insight: “I think, you know this is probably like Orientalism at its lowest common denominator. Basically, Goa trance is nothing to do with, trance itself has nothing to do with . , . India. . . . it’s funny because when house became popular, a lot of people reinvented trance just to be this all mystical, and Oriental, and Southeast-Asia [sic] like, to set themselves apart from house, to make it seem more like spiritual, or more psychedelic.” Hien’s comment speaks to the proliferation of subgenre distinctions in electronic music, a process that Kembrew McLeod (2001) points out is entangled with the marketing strategies of the music industry and the emergence of subcultural identities, but it also hints at the strong investment in subcultural distinctions even by youth opposed to the commodification of dance music. zy zyxwvut 8 Sunaina Maira - ~~ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Observers have described trance music as “a religion” and its fans as “tribally devoted to the scene,” an attitude which was very evident among the people I spoke to who felt passionately about the music and its impact on their lives but which is of course not necessarily unique to trance music fans.4 Most psy-trance parties are centered in New York and the Bay area but fans from Western Massachusetts travel together to participate in events, finding out about them by word-of-mouth or from fliers and websites. This is a subculture that is inherently nomadic, and the large parties are generally held not in clubs but in visually and digitally enhanced auditory environments created in ice-skating rinks, amusement parks, barns, and fields. The notion of space, and thus of community, is mobile and fluid but, at the same time, focused and circumscribed by subcultural ideologies about authenticity and virtuosity. The underground nature of the trance scene is what is appealing to those tired of the commercialism of the mainstream parties and the influx of younger clubbers who some participants, including deejays such as Kalyx, say are primarily drawn by the drugs rather than the music. Gavin, who owns a promotion company called Spectra and has organized some small trance parties in Amherst in recent years, said that there “isn’t really any money” in trance parties from a business perspective; in his experience, there is not enough of an audience for trance promoters or deejays to support themselves solely through producing trance music in the Valley, and most of the well-known trance deejays featured at his events come from Scandinavia. The appeal of trance parties for some, deejays and dancers alike, is that they are perceived as “underground” and as having a more spiritual vibe in opposition to the increasingly expensive, large-scale raves that are attracting high school students. In fact, Hien points out that the name “rave” itself is no longer used by insiders, in response to the mainstreaming of the subculture and the negative attention it has drawn in the mass media: Raves are like the ideal. But nowadays, being called a raver kind of has a lot of bad connotations. Because when you’re a raver, you’re trying to be underground, you’re trying to do lots of drugs and stuff. That’s why a lot of people now call themselves party kids, not ravers. . . . I use the term rave when I talk to someone who doesn’t know anything about the party scene. Like, “What you’re doing this weekend?” “I’m going to a rave.” Obviously, because if I said I’m going to a party, they’re like, “How many kegs are going to be there?” For Hien and other party kids, there is a clear sense of belonging to a youth zy TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture zyx zy 9 subculture that has to keep renaming and recreating itself in order to remain true to its own vision and distinct from the mainstream, even if that is outside what is sanctioned by the law. Hien points to the ways in which the subcultural ideology of a space that is truly underground becomes a mirage constantly receding in the distance: “Raves are just an ideology, but there’s no such thing as a rave anymore, it doesn’t exist. Everything’s promoted, everything’s hyped up, everything’s overpriced, security’s everywhere, so, the closest thing to raves are outlaw parties. Outlaw parties are illegal parties, and I guess you could call them raves. I don’t even know what to call raves.” Other party kids I interviewed also spoke somewhat nostalgically of a “golden age” of dance culture in the US., when parties were “really” underground and Ecstasy use was still in its honeymoon phase. Becca was introduced to electronic music when she was twelve years old and became heavily involved with the party scene when she moved to Washington, D.C. for college; she spoke of going to legendary clubs with the “old school party kids” who had by now moved out of the scene and wistfully recalled the days before raves were “discovered” by the mainstream: I watched it deteriorate and go down hill, like we’ve seen most everywhere, . . . To have a really, really good party, , . . you kind of need to have what we call old school kids, people who’ve been there since the beginning . . . and the year I was in D.C., I saw so many amazing people out of these parties, . . . amazing dancing, and by the time I was leaving, . . . I felt like just crying my eyes out. I hate to be stereotypical but there were frat boys and sorority sisters . . . and all of a sudden they are out there, rolling on Ecstasy, doing all kind of drugs. As Thornton (1 996, p. 3) and Malbon (1 999) point out, dance culture is an example of a “taste culture” internally differentiated by often subtle distinctions of style, dialect, and other social markers that convey subcultural capital, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and its naturalization of social hierarchie~.~ Becca’s lament about party culture’s decline suggests that there is a temporal dimension to the possession of subcultural authenticity, a clear distinction between those who were there at an originary moment and those who crashed the party later, expropriating it to the mainstream (Hebdige, 1979) or representing an image mainstreamed and so viewed with ambivalence within the subculture-such as that of the colorful “candy ravers” with their plastic jewelry and cuddly toys. Becca’s memory of the “amaz- zyxwvu zyxwv ing dancing” by old school ravers is significant because this is a subculture where many say that there are two ways to gain subcultural capital and advance in the social hierarchy: skill as a dancer or connections as a drug dealer. Two young men I spoke to, who were from working to lower-middle class families and living in the Amherst area, had worked in this “informal” economy and had dropped out of college for different periods of time; one had been arrested for drug possession a couple of times while the other eventually returned to college and graduated. As with all subcultural distinctions, the issue of drug use is highly contested and all the people I spoke to were ambivalent about its role in the party culture, expressing concern that drugs had given their subculture a bad rap, so to speak, and had overshadowed what to them was most important and unique about parties: the music and dancing. This is in large part why I have chosen not to reproduce here the focus on drug use of earlier writings on rave culture. The role of chemical substances in enjoying, and even inspiring, the music is certainly important but less attention has been paid to the social meanings of dance music for youth; moreover, there is almost no work that links raves to the politics of nation or globalization that shape the context in which young people make sense of and produce this music. I also take seriously, as does Daniel Cavicchi in his study of Bruce Springsteen fans ( 1998), the need to understand-although critically-what subcultural participants themselves prioritize as central or defining aspects of their experiences, which is particularly important when negotiating the ever-present risk of betraying youth while trying to represent their experiences (see also Gaines, 1990). Most of the young people I spoke to felt there had been far too much voyeuristic, vicarious, and distorted preoccupation by “outsiders” with drug use in rave culture, at the expense of understanding-certainly related-aspects of music, dance, and subcultural community. Dance is an extremely important element in this subculture which is, besides hip hop-from which it draws several stylistic and kinesthetic features-the youth subculture in which dancing is perhaps most heavily prized, even fetishized, and considered an art form. In club culture, as in hip hop, dance is a “celebration of individuality and community at the same time” (Fikentscher, 2001, p. 61). Dance, for party kids, becomes a vehicle for conveying social distinctions that help produce regional affiliations and gendered identities and that can, at times, be hierarchical. Hien proudly described New England as having the “illest” parties about which he had good reason to feel “snobby” because he claimed they showcased “the best dancers”; others party kids suggested that this regional pride may zyx zy TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture 11 have some basis in, at least, the geographic trajectory of rave culture and its recent reflorescence in the Northeast. Hien was himself a member of a dance crew, a collective of young men from Massachusetts who danced together at parties and who had joined the group by invitation. Dancing at parties can be competitive, with dancers engaging in battles adopted from breakdance rituals where dancers enter a circle and show off their agility. Becca was drawn to the subculture because of its opportunity to experiment with dance movements and became such an admired dancer that she was invited by party promoters and deejays to attend their events for free; she noted that “hardcore” dancers were sometimes encouraged to dance near the turntables, where they often gravitated, so that they could give visible feedback to the deejay in the reciprocal exchange of “energy” between music and body. As Fikentscher points out, dance is a fundamentally “social encounter” and, as such, becomes a space where young people respond to the “general social order,” even if their performances are not as subversive or resistant as he suggests in the context of disco and early house (2001, p. 61). There is an understanding among the youth I spoke to that the party subculture is particularly generational, that individuals spend a few years in the scene and then eventually move on, either burned out on the drugs or unable to maintain a lifestyle compatible with being in the workforce. So for many, the party scene can be viewed as fulfilling the role of a traditional youth subculture (Clarke et al. 1976), of providing a liminal space where youth can participate in shared rituals that create a sense of collectivity but that they ultimately leave when they enter adulthood and the larger social and class hierarchy. Most party kids are middle-class because the cover charges for these events are expensive-not to mention the drugs-and attending parties requires a schedule that allows for the travel to and fro and “recovery” afterwards, but there are also those who struggle to find the time and economic resources to participate consistently in the subculture. Jake, the young man who had dropped out of college and had a run-in with the law, came from a working-class family in a small, predominantly white town outside of Worcester and had spent a couple of years traveling to parties up and down the Northeast. He reflected, “Parties are like another reality, it’s another world. You can’t stay in there forever.” For youth like Jake, it seemed that the party scene possibly performed some of the functions of a subculture in the classic Birmingham school sense, providing a brief respite from the inevitable drudgery of (possibly dead-end) jobs and adult responsibilities. Reynolds concludes that British raves are “more like a new zyx Sunaina Maira 12 twist on a very old idea,” the “work hardplay hard structure of workingclass leisure” that does nothing to unsettle the class structures of (post)industrial society (1998, p. 239). However, I do think there is actually more to the politics of party culture than Reynolds concedes, for the question that needs to be addressed cannot be framed simply in terms of the classic subcultural framework of resistance or subversion, by now already challenged and revised in youth culture studies (Cohen, 1997; Flores, 2000; Gelder, 1997; Kelley, 1997; McRobbie, 1994; Muggleton, 1997). Instead, this preliminary research leads me to ask questions about the relation of youth, specifically U.S. party kids, to the post-industrial nation-state in an age of globalization. This question is particularly important given that electronic music, and the youth subcultures it has spawned and emerged from, are deeply intertwined with new forms of technology and cultural production that are characteristic of the mobile and deterritorialized post-Fordist economy, what Richard Smith and Tim Maughan call a “new political economy of youth and popular culture” based on dance music (1998, 21 1). Trance is a fascinating music subculture of the late 1990s because it illustrates some of the contradictions of these new, presumably postmodern, forms of subcultural politics in an age of cultural and economic globalization, and raises important issues of racialized and gendered citizenship, Orientalism, and cosmopolitanism. zy zyxwvu zyxwv zyx zyxwv Track I: Technology, Modernity, and Orientalism Jacques Attali, in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, writes, “Music heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of things to come. . . . It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form . . for it is one of the sites where mutations first arise and where science is secreted” (1985,4). Attali qualifies that he does not see music, and musicians, as simply mirrors of social realities, but his utopiaddystopic vision of music is useful because it is remarkably similar to the analyses that the young people I spoke to offered to understand the meanings of electronic music, particularly trance. Noah, an articulate and thoughtful young man who grew up in Northampton and has traveled to trance parties in New York and New England, believed that the very long, “low-frequency sound waves” of the heavy bass have a neurophysiological affect on dancers, in addition to or even apart from the influence of drugs, and had done research himself on traditional trance rituals that involved TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture zyx zy ’3 percussion and repetitive rhythms. In his view, the music was responsible for creating an altered state of being for the collectivity that was crucial to the appeal of trance parties. The idea of consciousness-altering rituals involving music and dance that simultaneously subvert and reinforce the social order, as Attali has argued, is obviously an old one. What is new in these contemporary rites at raves is the notion of simultaneously being modern, or even postmodern, and pre-modern, the expression of what some have called technoshamanism. Gavin explained why he used Mayan images on the fliers for his Spectra parties, saying, “Trance is the fusion of the newest technology available with the oldest rhythms available. People who come to the parties are very computer-literate, they are using technology to awaken their senses. The Mayans were very advanced for their time, and they were also very spiritual.” Trance parties rely on digital technology and a postmodern aesthetic based on sampling but they also distinguish themselves by their ritualistic performance and staging: there are live acts featuring not only musicians but also drummers and fire artists who perform with fireballs and firesticks. Successful party producers such as Gavin also pay special attention to the visual decoration, which include not just the digital images found at raves more generally but also installations of fabric and banners that react to the UV light, “Om” symbols, and images of Hindu deities. Becca says that she and her brother, Noah, “almost laugh when people talk about how new the rave scene is, how new this whole culture is, and we want to smack ’em . . . and be like, ‘Oh no, this has been going on since the dawn of time . . . people coming together and dancing and raising their energies together. ’” So does the appeal of tribal raves or psy-trance for youth, framed as a link to the primordial past, rest on a certain postmodern nostalgia in the late 1990s? The tribalism or primitivism of trance does not seem to display the “dialectic of closeness and distantiation” that Kathleen Stewart ( 1992, p. 253) suggests marks postmodern cultural nostalgia, a sense of being simultaneously far from and yet close to the fantasized moment or location. Rather, it seems that postmodern technology and narratives and images of premodernity are seamlessly fused in the imaginaries of trance participants. They claim, in fact, that their music and dance is another vibration of a primordial experience and embodies the surfacing of collective memory through the mediations of a deejay-shaman. The notion of time in narratives about trance is complex partly because, as Attali argues, the nature of music offers complex conceptual- zyxwvu zyx ’4 ~~ Sunaina Maira ~ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA izations of the relationships between people and society. These conceptualizations are not just about the future in the case of trance, but also about notions of the past. The remixed nature of electronic dance music allows for a sampling of sounds that are re-heard by youth today; Becca eloquently argues that trance unifies the present moment with history, and says of the music of DJ Mark Farina: “I was very obsessed with history... My parents, mostly my mother, told me that there was a way that I could apply the history that I loved by studying politics. And , . . Farina’s just a master at that . . . He spins [an] old school John Lennon song . . . Oh! It just makes me smile, because it’s my music from the past.” There is an interesting, if only implicit, link here between music and a political understanding of history, between sounds “from the past” and attempts to come to terms with a different historical moment, such as the sixties, that emblematizes a politics that has to be translated into the post-Civil Rights realities of the present. Yet the appeal of this music is based not just on a longing for a different political era but also the struggle of young people to make their parents understand their love of electronic music, often not even accepted as “music” by an older generation. Time appears in this narrative about music as part of an attempt to bridge generational divides through, rather than despite, popular culture (see also Cavicchi, 1998). Becca recalls that her friend’s father was won over to electronic music after listening to a track by Mark Farina that mixed a sample from John Cale with “downtempo, minimal house,” and she reflects, “Farina’s taking this musical genius from the past and he’s put it into words that I can understand . . . There’s this one Farina CD, he has this guy. . .just screaming, ‘We’re taking the disco, we’re mixing it with some Crisco, and we’re bringing it back, we’re bringing it back! ’” There are different temporal trajectories and notions of history that are remixed into electronic dance music that are audible to young people like Becca, and that complicate a simple notion of nostalgia. What is perhaps also audible-and especially visible-is that tribal techno and trance also offer white American youth a way to imagine a different space, for individual as well as collective performances of identity, and to reimagine themselves through racialized, and even globalized, notions of otherness. Noah had just returned from a party in New Hampshire when I spoke to him for the first time, and he described the outfit he had worn: a white dress with “Chinese characters” that glowed in the black light. He reflected, “So when I came into the costume, I take on this other persona. And that’s what a lot of people do, they go there to see zy zyxwvuts TranceClobalNation: Orientalism,Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture zyx zyx ’5 zyxwv things, do things, that they can’t in their everyday life. So I just wanted it to help step outside of myself.” This description could be read as suggesting a classic performance of Orientalism; however, in our conversation it became clear that it was not the Chineseness of the characters per se that helped Noah take on another persona but the experience of being in what he calls a “costume” and, notably, in a dress that he had altered for himself, of performing in an altered light. It is certainly true that trance parties draw heavily on mystical-psychedelic symbolism based on Hindu and Buddhist imagery; fliers for the Synthetic Sadhu parties in New York feature images of Ganesh and, yes, meditating sadhus. Noah’s response to these fliers was that they were appealing simply because they were colorful and psychedelic, but he did not seem to consume the Indian iconography through an exoticist lens. The evocation of India seemed to have meaning for Noah largely as a way to geographically situate the genealogy of the music, the name “Goa” leading him to believe that Goa trance was actually a music produced by Indians. This is probably where the Orientalism of trance might seep into the imaginaries of other American youth, for as Hien says: “I wish I knew why they chose that name Goa trance. . . . Maybe they wanted to mystifj trance further, by adding this element of Goa, this foreign world, you know.” Noah also acknowledged that this naming was part of consumerist packaging, saying, “It’s the label that has to be put on it. Our culture is so much about the label.” My conversation with Noah had an interesting reflexive dimension, producing the betrayal that I hinted at the outset, for during the course of our conversation he realized that Goa trance was really produced by tourists and really did not draw very many Indian followers. This was a revelation to him but he did not seem disappointed in the disabusing of this originary myth. Instead, his immediate response was, “Now I understand why people from your country would by offended by this, you know. I mean, maybe they don’t like being represented in this electronic music,” situating this music within the politics of representation. This is a politics that is not unequivocal and that some Asian American party kids themselves reject, going beyond notions of cultural authenticity or ownership. When I asked Hien how he felt about ravers using Asian symbols or style, he said, “I think it’s funny how a lot of people have kanji tattooed on them, and they don’t even know what it means. I shouldn’t talk, because I have Japanese kanji tattoos!” Hien did not see this appropriation of Asian iconography as problematic and thought that some non-Asian American women actually looked very attractive in the Chinese or zyxw 16 Sunaina Maira Vietnamese clothes that had become a popular fashion trend in the late 1990s. Indeed, in thinking about the complex meanings of Orientalism in this project, it occurred to me that my presence as a researcher had as much to do with the production of Orientalism as these young people’s own understandings. They learned that there were no Indian people in trance, but 1 was there. I was both dissolving the myth of the Indian authenticity of Goa trance and simultaneously embodying an Indian subject who, after all, had grown up in India and could be presumed to be authentically Indian, claiming as I did to know about the origins of the music and its relation to India. Needless to say, I did not enter this project with an intention to set the cultural record straight about Goa trance, but I also did not assume the role of the traditionally detached observer who listens but never comments or responds; this was a complex but always illuminating process, for notions of authenticity and Orientalism, mine and theirs, collided in sometimes unexpected ways. What role did my own interest in trance play in forming their responses to my questions about the consumption of difference? And what was the relationship of the possible fantasy of otherness performed through trance to larger notions of Orientalism? Recent work on Orientalism that refines Edward Said’s (1978) framework offers usefil ways of thinking about the production of Orientalism in turn-of-the-millenium U. S. youth culture. Meyda Yegenoglu points out, “To insist on the unity of Orientalist discourse is not to claim that it is a monolithic block. But, if the legacy of Orientalism is with us today, and if it has been able to survive despite the collapse of empires, it is because it has articulated itself differently in each instance” (1998, pp. 71-72). Holly Edwards, curator of the exhibition “Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasure: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930” (2000), conceptualizes Orientalism as “multivocalic,” evolving, and conflicted (2000, p. ix) and, in a similar vein, Lisa Lowe has examined “orientalist representations overlapping with rhetorics of gender and class” (2000, p. 325). If Orientalism is multivocalic, however, it is also self-reflexively evoked and ambiguously produced by scholars and critics. I began this project thinking that I would understand something about the “new Orientalism” in late capitalist U.S. youth culture. I did, but I also learned something about the reflexive production of Orientalism and about its ambiguous and uneven presence in youth culture because my subjects spoke back to me, as ethnographic subjects do. They forced me to think about the embeddedness of my questions in our relationship and to con- zy zyxwvu zyxwvuts TranceClobalNation:Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism,and Citizenship in Youth Culture ’7 sider difficult ethical and political questions about representation, that were not questions only about representations of India but about how their investments and opinions would be described for a largely academic audience that would, it is safe to say, would not be composed primarily of ravers. “Otherness” operates on multiple levels in the framing of this research, complicating overlapping distinctions between researcher/ researched, youth/adults, ravednon-raver, IndiadAmerican. The thoughtfulness of the young people I spoke to forced me to think more carefully about the interpretive models and theoretical assumptions I was bringing to the research, to really listen to what it was they were saying (Lipsitz 1999), though of course there are also moments in research when it is important to move between listening to “native ethnographers” and analyze critically what is not being said or brought into focus. This dialogic approach underscores the value of using ethnographic methods in cultural studies that go beyond the study of media as cultural texts and speaks to the larger debate about the strengths and shortcomings of youth culture studies in the U.S., where a focus on youth culture abstracted from the lived experience of youth themselves has sometimes seemed to be the dominant approach, as critics have pointed out (Grossberg, 1996; O’Connor, 1996; McRobbie, 1997).7 A self-reflexive ethnographic approach would consider not only what would it mean for me to describe youth as participating in an Orientalist fantasy, but also whether the narratives they produced would have been different if I had not been Indian American, if I had not asked them specifically about images of India, and so on. Perhaps by now, for those immersed in critical ethnography at least, it is a clichd to say that research is co-produced, within limits, and that is contingent and conjunctural. What we are still grappling with is the shape of the new knowledge produced through reflexive ethnography and its implications: substantive, epistemological, and political. zy zyxwvu zyxwvu Track II: Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Gender I returned to talk to Noah and Becca, having decided that I needed to explicitly discuss the politics of representing constructions of “difference’’ in the subculture and ask them directly whether they thought it would be accurate to describe trance culture as a manifestation of a particular strain of U.S. Orientalism. I explained to them what I understood as Orientalism, the construction of the “East” as opposed to the “West” in Edward Said’s (1978) framework, and Noah’s response was: You bring up East and West, and stuff like that, and it’s hard for me 18 zy zyxwv Sunaina Maira to think about that. And I don’t know why that is. You know, I’ve always lived in the West, . . . but for me, the music is a worldwide thing and that’s why it’s so important to me because I feel that it’s a force that can connect us all . . . that’s the only way that I try to talk about it, with most people, as a unifying force where [pause] I really believe that the dance and the music is the one tie that we really have. With our different languages, our different cultures, and all these differences, to me it really looks like . . . the roots of something we can all connect to. I realized that for Noah, the categories of “East” and “West” were really less important than a particular notion of cosmopolitanism, a belief in electronic music and dance as offering a universal language that can cross national boundaries. Kristen, a young white woman who grew up in Western Massachusetts and has been going to parties for many years, spoke of visiting New Zealand and “hanging out with producers and deejays,” commenting that “it was amazing that halfway around the world, there were people who could talk about the same things that I could talk about, and were dressing the same way.” Raves are clearly a global cultural phenomenon, and trance parties are drawing youth in countries as far-flung as Japan, Hungary, Mexico, and Australia. Lee, a young woman who has been to parties across New England, said that the theme of “we are one world, one people” is very evident in Goa trance. Fliers for raves and dance music albums often use the theme of a globalized world or “one planet” and the image of a world map. In Europe, the Love Parade, an annual technokrance festival in the streets of Berlin that draws up to a million people, has themes such as “We Are One Family” and “One Love, One World” (Borneman & Senders, 2000, p. 295). Yet, interestingly, the pull of nation and of nationalism still persists. A New York City rave in 2001 promoted by a production company called “Stuck on Earth and Unity” had a flier titled “One Nation,” with an image of the Statue of Liberty against red, white, and blue colors. Ostensibly, the tiny “I World’ and the world map were relegated to the background of the flier because this was a pre-July 4 party, but there is an interesting production here of youth as national subjects and as labor, with the reminder that there would be “no work” the next day. A trance album has the telling title “TranceGlobalNation” superimposed on an iconic globe represented by the meridians of latitude and longitude. It seems that, at least in some instances, the category of nation is used to imagine the planet; raves are for some an imagined community with (largely) horizontal, affective ties zy TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture ’9 much as the nation has been described by Benedict Anderson (1983), except it is now a “global-nation.” This, then, is not exactly a transnational subculture, in the specific sociological sense of social and institutional networks crossing and sometimes subverting the borders of the nation-state to create new forms of collectivity that may still be nationalist in spirit and purpose (Basch et al., 1994). The contradictory discourse of trance, with its seeming overriding of national identity and simultaneous evocation of nation as the model for a global community and, particularly, its discourse of universalist humanism, seem closer to the broader, more abstract notion of cosmopolitanism. Bruce Robbins proposes that “actually existing cosmopolitan ism,^' rather than an older, romantic notion of universalism, arises out of “an ethos of macro-interdependencies” (Rabinow, cited in Robbins, 1998, p. 1); in his model, cosmpolitanisms are not only plural and “come in different styles and sizes,” but they often work in support of nationalisms (Robbins, p. 2). Yet the usefulness of cosmopolitanism is somewhat ambiguous: what, exactly, is this cosmopolitical space “beyond,” and yet still yoked to, nation that manages to offer a place for critiquing what Robbins calls a “dangerously reinvigorated U.S. nationalism”--certainly a pressing question in the wake of September 11, 2001 (Robbins, p. 13)? Describing cosmopolitanisms as plural, postcolonial, or vernacular seems not to be enough. Clifford’s cautious and careful appraisal of cosmopolitanism is more useful in thinking about its role in global dance culture. He envisions “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” encompassing “a variety of elite and subaltern experiences of movement among cultures, politics, and economies,” and occupying just one position along a “continuum of sociospatial attachments,” from neighborhoods and cities to national communities and crossborder affiliations (Clifford, 1998, p. 367). Clifford also points out, “You do not, of course, have to leave home to be confronted with the concrete challenges of hybrid agency” (p. 367). It is in this sense, then, that I think that rave culture is cosmopolitical, for it has provided a social arena and a specifically auditory and sensory medium for young people to negotiate with and, more commonly, accommodate to the demands of nationalisms that are increasingly imbricated with globalization. These negotiations, Clifford realistically concludes, have more to do with hopes for “survival and ability to articulate locally meaningful, relational futures than with transformation at a systemic level” (367). This could well be a statement of the politics of rave culture, a description that is far more useful than the largely abstract focus on the “politics of disengagement” in other writings zy 20 Sunaina Maira on rave (Borneman and Senders, 2000). The politics, or cosmopolitics, of rave culture is clearly ambiguous and moves beyond the classic Birmingham school formulation of subcultural resistance; however, the politics of dance music cannot be captured in a flattening account of what is in actuality a highly internally differentiated and contested subculture, at least in the U.S. If raves are apolitical, they are still one way that young people engage with notions of the local and the impact of the global, as Clifford’s notion of cosmopolitanism suggests, an engagement that I would stress is contingent on their national, racial, gendered, and class locations. This particularity of cosmopolitics became apparent to me in the story of an Indian American woman at her first trance party, narrated for me by Becca. Anita was a college friend of Becca’s in D.C. whose parents had migrated from India, and Becca says: . . . her parents were very poor when they moved to the United States, they lived in a one-room attic with a bunsen burner and a stove . . . and now they’re very wealthy, you know, they made it in America. And Anita said that as a child, when she was going back to India, she was just so hurt and so grieved by the poverty that she saw around her. . . that she turned away from it and she didn’t want to be a part of it.. . . And so for many, many years she absolutely rejected [identification with India] and she sheltered herself in American culture. Anita finally decided to visit India again when she was twenty because, Becca said, she wanted to “figure out where I came from and who I am because of it.” Before she left, Becca invited her to attend a psy-trance party in D.C., describing it to her as featuring music that “came out of India” that had changed her brother’s life and helped him to find “a part of himself.” Anita went to her first rave dressed in a sari-“coming out” as Indian perhaps, or simply performing Indo-chic-and was “enraptured” by the party and the music. According to Becca, the music catalyzed a sense of ethnic pride, for Anita came away feeling, “I’m so proud of my people . . . who created this amazing, beautiful music that’s touching people’s lives.” After this experience, Anita supposedly wanted to move to San Francisco because of its vibrant dance party culture. This is a fascinating story because it shows the ways in which Asian American participants in this largely white, middle-class subculture-who may certainly be drawn to the music and dance-can use it to negotiate their own class anxiety by thinking not “beyond nation” but very much through “nation,” and perhaps also “global-nation,” a way to recast or zy zyxw zy TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture -. __ zy zyxw 21 repress questions of global economic inequities. Anita was able to claim pride in “her people,” significantly, because Becca framed trance music through a narrative about its presumed origins in India and also its transformative possibilities for white American youth. This fantasy, and misrecognition, of India provides a site of redemption for middle-class American youth grappling with the meanings of immigration and globalization in their lives, a way to reconcile the contradictions of U.S. multiculturalism, Orientalism, and globalized capital, The meanings of this experience are obviously very different for Anita and Becca, and Anita’s experience is filtered through her friend’s telling of it, leading to questions about the importance of this particular narrative for Becca. The story about Anita can, in fact, be read as another instance of a reflexive, multivocalic Orientalism in which ethnic subjects find themselves by turning to “the East” and American youth negotiate their own cultural and material anxieties through narratives about “other” places; Orientalism and cosmopolitanism often go hand in hand. This intertwining suggests that the location of the U.S. as a site from where people imagine or talk about cosmopolitanism has to be made explicit, as does the invisibility of U.S. national identity in youth popular culture (though much less so after the events of 9/11). As Borneman and Senders argue for middle-class German youth drawn to the Love Parade: “They are prosperous and secure, members of a dominant country and continent with no need to mobilize a people” (p. 3 12); the same might be said, perhaps, of white, middle-class American youth who turn to raves. The positioning of differentially racialized and classed subjects within the U.S. is important to take into account, as well as the varied meanings of cultural and political imperialism, when thinking about notions of cosmopolitanism produced by American youth, as opposed to German or Japanese or Mexican youth (Garcia Canclini, 200 1; Russell, 1992). The ambiguous relation between nation and planet in rave culture, as in global-nation, is also perhaps a way of coming to grips with the close link between nation and globalized capital, a link that is clearly at work at parties attended by an international rave community that can afford to travel around the world. Gavin commented that “anywhere where bohemian tourists congregate, Goa [trance] will be there.” The young people I spoke to all said that the parties they went to tend to be more diverse with regard to nationality than to race or class, attended largely by middle- to uppermiddle class youth from the U.S., England, Japan, Sweden, South Africa, and even Morocco. Parties are expensive to attend even for local partici- zy 22 Sunaina Maira pants, requiring disposable income to buy a ticket, which is often up to thirty to forty dollars; drugs (twenty to twenty-five dollars for a pill of “E”); bottled water; parking; and gas for road trips. Noah remarked that he was often unable to go to parties because he could not afford them, working as he does as an “entrepreneur” for his father’s small multimedia business. Black and Latino youth are generally absent from the scene, though this varies by location and music genre. Lee observed that there were actually “quite a few” middle-class Asian Americans (generally Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans) at raves in the Amherst area and that they tended to be from predominantly white towns where, she says, “their culture was similar to my culture.” Yet this middle-class suburban cultural style in turn draws from fantasies of other lifestyles; Hien points out that the style in rave culture shifted in the late 1990s from the blissful, childlike imagery of candy ravers with lollipops and pacifiers to a “ghetto style” adopted by “wannabe gangsters.” Mainstream rave culture has been influenced by hip hop’s burgeoning popularity and Hien thinks that many “middle-class, white kids” are drawn to raves because they want to “be all tough, badass and mean.” Fantasies of class and race thus become intertwined in the cultural consumption of this music and dance, suggesting the ways in which young people negotiate their relationship to the nation-state through various practices and ideologies of cultural citizenship in popular culture. Nestor Garcia Canclini writes that “the habits and tastes of consumers condition their capacity to become citizens” and argues that “for many men and women, especially youth, the questions specific to citizenship, such as how we inform ourselves and who represents our interests, are answered more often than not through private consumption of commodities and media offerings than through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation in discredited legal organizations” (p. 119, p. 5). This is strikingly true of the discourses of nation and globalization that emerge from this preliminary study of electronic music and rave culture. The adherents of trance music participate in a definition of nation, or global-nation, that is fundamentally “an interpretive community of consumers’’ (Canclini, pp. 43-44). Canclini’s astute analysis is useful for grounding the notion of cosmopolitanism and, importantly, nationalism in social practices of consumption and focusing on the specific relationship of global markets to cultural production and consumption. Raves are spectacles that are very much intertwined with the leisure industry and the targeting of youth as a niche market, even if psy-trance zy zy zyxwvu zyx zy zyx TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture ~- ~ 23 ~~ parties are going underground and trying to distinguish themselves from commercialized events. Becca said, “America’s so focused on capitalism, so focused on money, that it makes sense you know [that] they messed it up, they’ve messed up the party scene.” It becomes apparent that it not just youth in rave culture who have moved away from traditional arenas for the expression of citizenship or “political participation.” Canclini’s framework suggests that we need to be more attuned to the new forms that citizenship takes in an era where relations of social belonging are “steeped in consumption,” while simultaneously pursuing efforts “to reconceptualize the public sphere” and to realize “the right to participate in the remaking of the system, that is, to redefine the very arrangement in which we desire to be included” (p, 21 ; pp. 154- 155). Placing consumption in relationship to citizenship, as Canclini does, allows us to realize that while rave culture may not be a space where there is any direct engagement with, let alone critique of, traditional notions of the state or of civic nationalism, the desires and needs of young people that are invested in this space are certainly part of larger structures of (“local” and “global”) feeling that are being expressed through an increasingly commoditized popular culture (Evans et al., 2000, p. 161). Rather than placing the politics of rave culture outside of the field of “traditional politics,” Canclini’s framework would suggest that the communitarian desires expressed through raves are on a continuum of manifestations of political subjectivities that have been transformed over time by the impact of global migration, new media, changing labor markets, and consumption practices. What Canclini does not really attend to in Consumers and Citizens is, first, music, focusing largely on visual culture, particularly film and television; and, second, gender and sexuality, largely overlooking the gendered dimensions of citizenship or consumption. Paying attention to gendered and sexualized experiences of sociality in this subculture is important because it reveals that the “community” created at dance parties rests on gendered imaginaries and practices that are both transgressive and traditional. On the one hand, as Noah’s account of his dress suggests, masculine style is redefined and is somewhat flexible, perhaps more so in the trance scene than other subcultures within rave. Critics point out that the ethos of raves, created by the music and the drugs, shifts the focus from conventional expressions of heterosexuality and, sometimes, from the sexual objectification of women (Reynolds 1999, p. 247; Pini 1997, p. 167). Writings on rave culture point out that people tend to dance alone at parties, rather than in couples-although the collective energy of the dance zyxw ~ zy z zyxwv Sunaina Maira 24 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA - floor certainly makes it an interactive and not just solitary experience (Pini, 1997; Borneman & Senders, p. 303). Yet it seems important not to overlook the invisibility of women in the production of the scene in order to understand the kinds of collective, rather than individual, identities produced at raves and the possibility of nascent notions of cultural citizenship. If women participate in raves largely as consumers and not as producers, it seems that femininity is present largely as symbolic imagery to be parodied, for example, through crossdressing; women themselves are still, in many ways, objects, target consumers of music and events produced and orchestrated by men. In the U.S, it seems that for the most part it is still men who control the production of raves and men who perform as deejays, with a few exceptions. In my view, turntablism remains an insider’s club largely because of the homosocial networks that initiate and endorse male deejays, as in other musical subcultures (Reynolds, 1999; Straw, 1997). This is nicely illustrated in a moment in the film, Groove (2000), about a San Francisco rave, when British trance deejay star John Digweed symbolically passes on one of his albums at the end of the party to a young Asian American man who is a novice deejay; the subcultural capital literally passes from man to man and bypasses the female deejays showcased in the film. Moreover, it seems that traditional gender distinctions persist in raves and these spaces are not completely free of the pick-up practices that make women uncomfortable, which some participants attribute to the mainstreaming of house and techno parties. Noah still seemed to think that the psy-trance parties were a more welcoming environment for women and noted that aggressive heterosexual masculinity and conventional courtship rituals are sometimes performed, particularly at larger, more “mainstream” parties, through a competitiveness among male dancers: “The girls are kind of waiting for the victor of the competition to come out and then, they’ll kind of gravitate toward him.” It is interesting that the notion of “the dancer” is alternatively used to denote an androgynous role available equally to both men and women and, at the same time, a persona that is fundamentally gender-coded. Becca, who was the only woman in a crew of dancers in Washington, D.C., says, “I was called a masculine dancer. . . . And it was because I was sure of myself, I was moving with surety. I wasn’t just bopping around.” Hien, who learned how to do ballroom dancing from his Vietnamese immigrant father when he was young, said, “I dance like a girl . . . I use a lot more hips when I dance, a lot of guys don’t know how to do that.” So, implicitly and sometimes overtly, androgynous style zyxwvu TranceGlobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism,and Citizenship in Youth Culture 25 zy coexists with a gendered discourse of bodily expression that attempts to rein in, or at least mark, those who play with its gendered boundaries. There is an ambivalence among women who participate in the scene about how to negotiate these subcultural distinctions and gendered hierarchies. Becca was uneasy about spaces created to showcase women deejays because she supported a seemingly postfeminist stance among musicians who, like the famous deejay Heather Hart, were presumably able to “bust through this whole hierarchy . . . because she’s not focusing on [gender].” Other women I spoke to, and even some men like Noah, thought it was problematic that women did indeed have to struggle more to gain acceptance in the subculture, whether as a deejay or dancer, and that a critique of gender was inescapable. One widely admired female dancer in Amherst pointed out she had to literally embody a certain masculinity in motion, performing movements designed for male bodies. So while gender performances are on some level able to break the binary of male/female or subvert heteronormative sexualities through new forms of dance, style, and social relationships, in other instances they fall back on traditional definitions of sex and understandings of “male” and “female” bodies. Interestingly, some party kids attributed the homosociality of raves to the gay genealogy of the disco and house genres from which it emerged, yet what is more obviously apparent is that there has developed a parallel subculture of gay circuit parties that attract largely middle- to upper-middle class, gay, white men in the U.S.8Sexual citizenship is an underlying element of the collective identity negotiated and produced in specific subcultural sites within dance culture (Bell and Binnie, 2000), and one that highlights the unnevenness of belonging to the cosmpolitanist fantasy of “global-nation.” zyxw zyxwv Conclusion Caitlin Ross, a former student of mine, wrote in an astute paper on raves: “Rave subculture is a training ground for youth, and the structural similarity means that the skills that a middle-class raver is developing in the rave scene are the skills that s h e will use to succeed in the dominant world. This is an important point to realize when questioning why ravers leave the scene” (Ross, 2000; see also Champion, 1997). Rave culture, as Ross argues, is a space where youth play with the tensions inherent to socialization into racialized, classed, and gendered national identities and test the limits of the law. Groove offers an image of ravers as youth positioned to fulfill their role as heterosexual citizens and resourceful high-tech zyxwv 26 Sunaina Maira zy entrepreneurs in the new economy, particularly since the film was released before the collapse of Silicon Valley. In the film, the party organizers try to keep the police at bay by claiming that the rave is really a high-tech business operating out of a warehouse and ultimately set up in a new location after being busted. In an era of flexible labor and production, the nomadic technology of raves allows them to happen at shifting locations even within a single night, modeling the movement not just of global capital but also of the mobility associated with dot.com entrepreneurs. Ross calls rave culture “a teaching space,” an illuminating notion to consider the ways in which issues of sexual and cultural citizenship, technology, consumption, cosmopolitanism, race, and nationalism are explored and tested in this subculture. The fantasies that are performed in this space, of otherness and oneness, of evading a middle-class lifestyle, and of postfeminist technology, are complex tracks with often contradictory vibes produced in response to new notions of citizenship and consumption in the face of globalization. Epilogue I shared different versions of this paper with Noah and Becca as my work progressed in the event that they may have wanted to share their thoughts on my analyses, since they were extremely supportive of the research and the most eager to help of all the people I interviewed. I did not receive any feedback from them on the paper itself but they did continue to keep in touch and share with me moments that seemed important to them, which seemed to be its own form of dialogic feedback. Noah and Becca invited me to attend a biweekly house music party they hosted for a while in Northampton, creating a new space for party kids in the town. Becca returned to school to study graphic design and was hoping to produce artwork for deejays and album covers. A few months after doing this research, I met with them in Holyoke, where they were planning to produce a new party in a converted paper mill building that is part of the urban redevelopment scheme to revitalize the former industrial town, home to a large Puerto Rican population struggling with unemployment and a dismally high school dropout rate. Our conversation in an airy loft space, where their father’s multimedia company is now based, highlighted once again the ways in which dance culture is intertwined with ongoing contests over urban space, gentrification, the “new economy,” and race. Noah commented that after our interiews he began asking himself, uneasily, if the party scene was simply a space for middle-class white people, something he had not thought about zyxw TranceClobalNation: Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture 27 before. We talked about ways that the parties might draw in local Latino youth and the possibility of spinning Latin house and getting in touch with local deejays, ideas which seemed to be in tune with their vision for “bridging communities” through music. Becca and Noah had co-produced a digitally produced short video about the meanings of electronic music for young people that they screened for me; in the voiceover, Becca says to an imagined disbeliever, “You listen to what you want to hear, I tell you what I know.” That line encapsulated for me the challenge in doing reflexive ethnography and the possibilities for new knowledges as both researcher and researched reflect on their assumptions and affiliations. The tensions of betrayal are not resolved by their airing, I realize, but the loyalty, caring, and questioning that they imply have propelled a constant rethinking of my models of research, and perhaps also of the social spaces created by dance music as it travels from the bars of Northampton to the paper mills of Holyoke. zy 28 zy zyxwvu Sunaina Maira - - ~~ .~ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Notes 1. This particular “confession” lies somewhere between the implicit assumption that cultural critics write only about the cultural forms they are drawn to personally (the intellectual as “fan”) and the notion that cultural critics write best about the cultural forms they do not really like and from which they have a critical distance (the intellectual “neutral observer”), while the reality of researcher reflexivity, of course, is far more complex and often, uneasily ambiguous, as many others have pointed out (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Grossberg, 1992). zyxwvut zyxw zyxw 2. I have focused elsewhere on the meanings of this cultural commodification of “Asian cool” for South Asian American youth in relation to growing labor migration from South Asia, as well as increasing antiimmigrant sentiment and anti-Asian attacks in the U.S. (see Maira 2000). 3 . I did this research in spring and summer 2001, during which time I did eight interviews with young people involved in the electronic music party scene as participants, producers, and deejays; I also talked to several other people informally about the subculture and learned a great deal from my undergraduate students at UMass, Amherst, particularly those in my course on youth cultures. 4.See Daniel Cavicchi (1998) on religious metaphors among Bruce Springsteen fans and in their “conversion” narratives. 5. The notion of subcultural capital in dance culture is one that I have explored elsewhere in the context of Indian remix music and dance (Maira, 2002). 6. Crisco Disco, in fact, was one of the early, (notoriously) underground gay discos in New York in the 1970s (Fikentscher, pp. 26, 99). 7. Recent work suggests this may be changing (see: Austin and Willard, 1998; Flores, 2000; Kelley, 1997; Maira and Soep, forthcoming; Riviera, 200 1; Shank, 1994; Simonett, 200 1). 8. 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