Glocal imaginaries and musical displacements in the work of Richards Powers

In the novel The Time of Our Singing (2003) by American novelist Richard Powers, the glocal—the dynamic interaction between the local and the global—is addressed not so much through place per se, but through the tension between two musical traditions with vastly different origins and diasporas: the African American and the European classical tradition. I argue that in Powers’s novel the tension between the two musical traditions is used to explore the issue of racial identity and cultural belonging from many different, sometimes opposing, angles. To aid my discussion I use three concepts with musical connotations: contrary motion, musical miscegenation and resonances.