Ethnicity, Identity and The Global City.

Globalization has complicated modern ways of configuring identity, and intensified both political and scholarly struggles over the category of «identity». The centrality of the term has recently been subject to criticism, both in anthropology and musicology, where many argue, persuasively, that we do a violence to our understanding of contemporary selves and cultural processes by insisting that they are only about «identity construction» and the production of difference. This article suggests that identity construction and «difference producing» still need to be understood as central cultural processes in modern urban life, but seeks ways of embedding these processes in the everyday life of communities, corporations and cities. Cultural identities, in this view of things, will appear as contested processes constantly under construction and dissolution. Musical activity, whose meanings are often particularly hard to fix, provides a useful vantage point. The case study in this article concerns Cartel, a German-Turkish hip-hop group, whose self-conscious and highly contested identity politics need to be understood in the intersecting contexts of migrancy in Europe post 1989, world music in the recording industries, Turkish Islamism, and «global» refashioning of Istanbul.