Evading National Identity: On Translocal Irish Folk Music in Austria

Abstract

This article assesses how translocal Irish folk-music practices and their consumption in Austria elide the traumatic legacy of extreme nationalism in modern European history. Furthermore, it teases out the degree to which the affinity of Austrian performers and audiences with Irish folk music might provide an alternative sphere of cultural identification to indigenous Austrian folk-music practices. Combining ethnographic and historical inquiry, the article unravels how various nostalgically sustained imaginaries of Irishness find complex refractions in the Austrian present, while also interrogating the stakes of an emerging insistence upon the primacy of “the music itself” in ethnographic voices.