Welsh Journals

Families of Resemblance: Welsh Popular Music and Other Marginalia SARAH HILL In his study of Hispanic musicians in Los Angeles, George Lipsitz states that: [in] many areas of cultural production, but especially in popular music, organic intellectuals within the Los Angeles Chicano community pursued a strategy of self-presentation that brought their unique and distinctive cultural traditions into the mainstream of mass popular culture. Neither assimilationist nor separatist, they played on 'families of resemblance' similarities to the experience and culture of other groups to fashion a 'unity of disunity'. In that way, they sought to make alliances with other groups by cultivating the ways in which their particular experiences spoke with special authority about the ideas and alienations felt by others. They used the techniques and sensibilities of postmodernism to build a 'historical bloc' of oppositional groups united in ideas and intentions if not experience. Families of resemblance are instructive to our (centrist) under- standing of the crises of identity faced by marginalized others. In the realm of popular culture, the blanket terminology often invoked in an attempt to define the many hybrid musical forms which arise from what is commonly referred to as the 'postmodern condition' is clari- fied somewhat by a closer look at the origins of the fusions and of their common roots, musical and cultural. The postmodern condition is said to allow for a multiplicity of styles, a cultural free-for-all, ironic referential cannibalism, endless combinations of cultural sym- bols and signifiers appropriated and decontextualized all due to the absence of an overriding master narrative. In postmodernist and postcolonial theories of culture, the idea of the master narrative is the backdrop against which marginalized cultures celebrate the 'decen- tred and polyglot nature of popular culture',2 and which creates the cultural fusion of minority and dominant discourses central to our Hispanic-Welsh family of resemblance.