Peer-to-peer music exchange, sampling, and digital distribution have garnered much attention in recent years, notably in debates about authorship, intellectual property, media control, and 'Web 2'. However, empirical scholarship on how these technologies are used creatively by musicians and fans is still sparse. In this interdisciplinary ethnography of 'bedroom producer' culture, Andrew Whelan examines interaction and exchange within a specific online milieu: peer-to-peer chatrooms dedicated to electronic music, focusing on a genre known as 'breakcore'.The author draws on semantic anthropology, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, and critical musicology to explore the activity afforded by this controversial and criminalised environment. Through in-depth analysis of often ritually vituperative text-based interaction, discussions of music, and the samples used in that music, Whelan describes the cultural politics and aesthetics of bedroom producer identity, highlighting the roles gender and ethnicity play in the constitution of subcultural authenticity.Empirically driven throughout, this book also engages with a spectrum of social theory; in doing so, it highlights the intersections between gender, interaction, technology and music. This book will prove valuable for students and scholars with interests in gender and language use, computer-mediated communication, online subcultures and virtual community, and the evolution, production and distribution of electronic music."The fields of diaspora studies and postcolonial ethics are gaining in popularity and prestige.

The collection provides very comprehensive coverage of both the issues and debates that animate diaspora studies in the humanities and a series of distinctive and careful mappings of these issues."Dr Alison Donnell, Reader at the School of English and American Literature at the University of ReadingSeeking the Self-Encountering the Other is an important and powerful volume of essays, which asks how ethics can be responsive to the kinds of otherness thrown up by living in a diasporic world. What kinds of encounters with others are possible when unfinished histories of colonialism shape the landscapes of the present? With a remarkable willingness to proceed from the particular, and a patience for thinking through the complexities of history and inheritance, this volume has much to teach us about the practical as well theoretical value of ethical thinking. Individual contributors reflect on questions of trauma, power and conflict, and attend with optimism to the ongoing living potentiality for new cultural forms in situations of encounter. Showing us on every page that ethics is also about how we read and know about others, as well as how we allow ourselves to be affected by others, this volume will open up a much needed dialogue between postcolonial studies of diaspora and ethical criticism."Sara Ahmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.