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Psychedelic White Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race Arun Saldanha Table of Contents		$20.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4994-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4994-5 $60.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4993-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4993-8
A bold new approach to racial difference conceived through rave tourism. The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are? A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation. Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering unique insights into the global underground music scene, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race. “Psychedelic White is a compelling provocation to the theoretical frameworks traditionally summoned to study race and racism.” —Social & Cultural Geography Arun Saldanha is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. 288 pages | 13 halftones, 11 line art | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Ethnography as Thought 1. Psychedelic Whiteness 2. What Materialism? 3. Tripping on India The Researcher’s Body Viscosity 4. Goa Freaks 5. Drugs and Difference 6. Trance, Dance and the Trance-Dance 7. The Psychopathology of Travel The Trials of Transcendence 8. Visual Economy 9. Faces of Goa 10. Zombie Beach 11. Sunlight and Judgment Purity as Machinic Effect 12. The Politics of Location 13. Cliques 14. Noise, Narcotics, Law and Order 15. Dealing with the Third World When the Music’s Over 16. A Machinic Geography of Phenotype 17. Freaking Whiteness The Molecular Revolution Appendix: Field/Work Notes Index

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