attention is being paid to the implications that such a uniformity will have on the cultural life in the 21st century. Not to mention that if in the West this expansion is perceived as an irrevocable necessity, for the largest slice of the world it may still be experienced as an imported circumstance associated with the spectre of a cultural aggressor. Yet, such an ethnocentrism is an acute problem within Western societies themselves.

The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot draws our attention to the problem of diversity as a cultural shortcoming of this situation. ‘If we bracket the liberal discourse and look freshly at the results’, he writes, ‘we can see old problems in new light. . . . take diversity. Part of the problem with diversity is that most academics – liberals or not – do not really believe in its intellectual value. They back diversity – when they do – for social and political reasons, some noble, some suspicious. They view it mainly in terms of physical attributes – one skirt here, one dark skin there, necessary diversions on their way to matters of essence: let’s hear the black or the female viewpoint and move along. Thus, beyond paying a reluctant homage to the often unfortunate politics of identity, the social sciences and the humanities have yet to theorise the experience of the world outside the North Atlantic.’³

Such considerations are a reminder of how the political theories of the West have managed to crystallise a sociocultural infrastructure, an ‘historicization of the West’ with ‘its assumptions, its claim and its genealogies’, of which the global village is nothing but an ultimate expansion. ‘. . . Those of us who work on the Caribbean’, Trouillot continues, ‘know that the world was global since at least 1492. Europe became Europe, in part through severing itself from what lay south of the Mediterranean, but in part also through a Westward move that made the Atlantic the center of the first truly global empires . . . What is new today is not globalisation as such – we are too late for that. Rather, what is unique to our times is the widespread awareness of global processes among increasingly fragmented populations. That awareness grows everywhere, largely because of the increase in both the size and the velocity of global flows. Capital, populations, and information move in much greater mass and at an increasing speed. At the same time, most human beings continue to act locally. Thus, we are witnessing the rise of what I call a fragmented globality. World histories and local histories are at once becoming both increasingly intertwined and increasingly contradictory. The twenty-first century is likely to be marked by the speed and brutality of these contradictions.’⁴

Despite the growing social and technological uniformity in a large number of countries, not all the cultures of the world are experiencing the same historical reality and definitions such as ‘global village’ need to be urgently redefined, since they have become a commonplace stemming from a blend of recycled Western cultural clichés and commercial pursuits.⁵ Indeed in such a social climate music could provide a