Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Community Of Sentiment: Indo-Fijian Music And Identity Discourse In Fiji And Its Diaspora, Kevin C. Miller

Kevin C. Miller

Through an historical and ethnographic account of Indo-Fijian music and related cultural practices, this dissertation examines the co-implicative relationship between music making and collective identity formation. Indo-Fijians, who compose about 37 percent of Fiji’s current population, descend primarily from colonial-era Indian laborers. Specifically, I interpret discourses about music and discourses of music to query three broad intersections of musical performance and “community”: 1) the “subethnic,” in which the heterogeneous “Indo-Fijian community” negotiates internal difference; 2) the national, in which fraught social and political relationships between Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians—the majority population—inhibit their co-authoring of the nationstate; and 3) the transnational, …