Sounding Diaspora through Music and Play in a Russian-American Summer Camp

Abstract

Music, ethnicity, youth and social bonding: perhaps nowhere do these elements intersect more powerfully than within the ethnic-American summer camp. Although summer camps have been virtually absent from ethnomusicological inquiry, they present rich sites for interrogating the nuanced negotiations of identity that can occur within a diaspora. Based on fieldwork conducted at a Russian-American summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains (New York, USA), this paper explores how camp music presents a productive sphere for playing out contentious issues of diaspora (including inter-wave tension, hyphenated identity politics and disagreements over the purpose of a longstanding diaspora). Analysing music-making within this community through a theoretical lens of play (igra), this paper presents an original study of Russian émigré music and demonstrates how summer camp music presents a site for mediating competing epistemologies of the Diasporic Self for a diaspora that is facing an ontological juncture.