We all know the foreigner who survives with a tearful face turned towards the lost homeland. Melancholy lover of a vanished space, he cannot, in face, get over his having abandoned a period of time. The lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never be able to recover. (Kristeva 1991, p. 9)

In recent years, historians have belatedly recognised the growth of the British brass band as one of the most remarkable developments in the sphere of popular music-making in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not only did ‘banding’ provide an absorbing pastime for tens of thousands of amateur musicians, but brass band performances also fulfilled an important cultural and educational role in introducing the standard classics of the bourgeois musical canon to mass audiences who never saw the inside of an opera house or a concert hall. In addition, satisfying the needs of these new-style bands for music, instruments, uniforms and other impedimenta led to the growth of a group of small, specialised and resourceful enterprises which successfully developed a mass market for their wares in Britain and the colonies. By the end of the 1890s, there could have been few towns or villages, whether in the remoter parts of the British Isles or even the most far flung corners of the white dominions, where some kind of brass band did not add its distinctive tones to the annual cycle of formal and informal events which made up their community's social calendar.

This morning I unintentionally stumbled across the annual Cherry Blossom Parade in Washington, DC. It was probaly little different than any other American public parade, full of decorated floats and oversized balloons interspersed between uniformed marching bands from high schools all over the country. What caught my attention was the ‘foreign’ element in the parade – three groups that represented Japan, land of the cherry blossom. Two of these groups were local martial arts associations: one representing the Ryuku Islands, the other, Okinawa. The men and women of both contingents, obviously multiethnic, were dressed alike in stereotypical Japanese martial arts costumes (complete with coloured headbands). Participants paused every few steps to demonstrate kicks and poses, then proceeded on to the sound of traditional Japanese music played through loudspeakers. The third group was the official Japanese delegation, flown over especially for the parade. I'm not sure what I expected – perhaps a float of graceful kimono-clad Japanese women waving cherry blossom branches to the ethereal sound of the shakuhachi. Instead, to my surprise our ears were assailed by a familiar John Philip Sousa march played with gusto by a Japanese high school band. The only difference between this band and its American counterparts was that the musicians did not wear unisex military uniforms: all wore fuchsia pink school blazers, with long white pants for the boys and short white skirts for the girls (Sarkissian 1994).

For a mid-twentieth century historian of the music hall, blackface minstrelsy was the ‘oddest form of entertainment imaginable’. He found it ‘incomprehensible’ why people during the Victorian period had delighted in the ‘extraordinary spectacle of the apparently sane white man blacking his face and hands with burnt cork, painting his lips and eyes to resemble those of an African nigger, and then, to complete the incongruity, attiring himself in English evening dress while he sang ditties allegedly emanating from the cotton plantations of Ole Virginny!’ (Felstead 1946, p. 55). There are a number of things to be said about this evaluation, the first being that its severe disparagement of one of the most popular cultural forms of the Victorian period in Britain was, during that period, exceptionally rare. Indeed, the lack of criticism attests to its enduring popularity. From their first wave of success in the late 1830s and early 1840s, minstrel acts, troupes and shows figured as a staple item of the popular stage throughout the remaining decades of the century. What began with its early boom in the second quarter of the century continued to prove attractive to successive generations across all social classes, and among men and women of the large urban centres, provincial towns and outlying rural areas alike.

The subject of his article reflects what Robert Crawford has called ‘a growing wariness of notions of an essentialist Scotland’ (1994, p. 57). The article has been written partly as a contribution to the critique of ‘essentialist’ notions of national identity in gerneral and ‘Scottishness’ in particular. I share the concern of Stuart Hall (1990; 1995) and others (Massey 1991; Rose 1995) to challenge ideas which reproduce notions of the ‘boundedness’ or ‘purity’ of territorial and national identities; whilst recognising that such identities are, by definition, only likely to change slowly (Therborn 1995). My approach to the analysis of national identity is to try to follow the ‘social construction of reality’ thinking which informs much current writing on the relationships between ethnicity, place and identity (Jackson and Penrose 1993). From that point of view, regarding Scottish national cultural identity in the late twentieth century,