Music is one of the most important aspects of cultural identity in Corsica. Rooted in ancient history and revitalized in the revolutionary political climate of the 1960s and 70s, its popular choral form--the paghjella--has come to define modern music upon the island. Music, like language, has the ability to communicate certain feelings and values beyond its structural form and can also serve as a marker for individual as well as collective identity. In a minority regional context such as that of Corsica, many view cultural expressions such as language and music as 'guardians' of a local tradition that is weakened in a globalizing world. Thus, according to them, these expressions should remain pure and 'faithful' to their heritage. Yet, and likely in part because of globalization, music in Corsica has largely changed in recent decades. Musicians there today are combining ancient and modern forms, adopting instruments and styles not native to the island, and, in some cases, rejecting altogether 'traditional' Corsican music. Yet many of these, in as much as they represent a growing norm, often come under close scrutiny by those who regard their music as either inauthentic or betraying of tradition. Although some balance or hybridity of both 'new' and 'old' appears to be the preferred form of modem musical expression, the very notions of traditional and non-traditional are still debated and are at present widely discussed in Corsica, in a larger, more general sense of identity. The island's music provides a valuable perspective of the ongoing processes of cultural awareness and change. / Graduation date: 2004

Contemporary French identity issues are often conceived spatially in popular imagination and political discourse. France and French identity have been mapped into a series of imagined exclusionary spaces through media representations and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that artists in the fields of film, rap music and fiction are actively yet often indirectly intervening in French identity debates by reframing the question of “integration” and by demonstrating that not only can one be simultaneously French and “other,” but that French identity is always already more complex and transnational than prevailing discourses of “imagined” identity will admit. This is done most effectively, I contend, by avoiding the clichéd and reductive spaces and spatial categories that inflect the debate. The works I examine employ travel and motion to move beyond the discursive ghettos such as beur or banlieue cinema or “minority” music and fiction. While often less overtly political these responses are more effective than the more typical banlieue narrative of clash and confrontation with power. Taking examples from cinema, I argue that the road movies I address are effective weapons of the weak precisely because they avoid the traps inherent in representing the banlieue. My analysis demonstrates that the discursive ghetto is not always a bad thing for a filmmaker because referring to representational stereotypes can open the possibility of more readily “trapping” the viewer and therefore forcing him/her to actively participate in the process of decoding the author’s positioning. Often works attempting to contest spatial exclusion run the risk of simply falling into entrenched binary conceptions of society, reinforcing what the viewer already thinks they know about life in the suburbs or as a minority in general. Looking beyond cinema to music and literature, I demonstrate how artists are mobilizing narrative of space and identity to re-chart France with “hyphenated” perspectives, from African and Algerian to Portuguese and Pied-noir. / text