Coping and confinement on the border: the affective politics of music workshops in British immigration detention

ABSTRACT

In the drive to securitise migration, immigration detention has expanded rapidly across western democratic states. This article investigates the function and meaning that music workshops have for foreign nationals held in UK detention centres. Drawing on scholarship on affect and emotion, I consider how the workshops produce separate affective forms of time and space that stand apart from, but also shape the dominant structures and social discourses of the detention centre. For many participants, caught in a state of perpetual dislocation and the hierarchies of detention centre orderings, the workshops are a space to escape or make sense of place, investing space with an affectivity that provides a meaningfully felt counterpoint to the austerity of the detention every day. Nevertheless, as much as music is a resisting practice and a means of reinventing detention, it also functions as a technology of social control, perpetuating hegemonic orderings. Thus, a closer look at the performance space draws attention to the ways in which music merges with other biopolitical technologies in structuring and defining life in detention.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration detention
• music in prison
• affect
• control
• resistance

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and to the editorial team of this journal for their support with this manuscript. I am forever grateful to Professor Bridget Anderson and Dr Angela Impey for their helpful conversations on this research. Warm thanks go to the NGO and workshop volunteers who contributed their time and helped facilitate this project. Ultimately, this article is for those I spoke with held in detention in the hopes of brighter futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA. She received her DPhil in anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2017, and holds degrees in ethnomusicology and music. Her current research looks at the outsourcing of asylum and border enforcement to Central American countries and Pacific island nations through the framework of resource extraction.

Notes

1 I have removed reference to the names of the facilities and to the NGO and participants in order to maintain confidentiality. Instead, pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

2 Since the passage of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act in 2002, immigration detention centres are officially referred to as immigration removal centres or IRCs in the UK to reflect their purported objective. ‘Immigration detention’ is the common terminology used worldwide and so this paper makes use of both designations.

3 Although people held in detention centres are commonly referred to as ‘detainees’, this paper refers to ‘detained men’, ‘detained migrants’, or ‘people in detention’ so as to better humanise those incarcerated in facilities. While some people are awaiting decisions on asylum claims, many are not, therefore this paper does not make reference to asylum seekers in detention. Many in detention have also been in the UK for a long time before incarceration, which troubles their classification as ‘migrants’. Nevertheless, most have at some point immigrated to the UK, thus this paper retains the use of ‘migrants’.

4 See Hughes (2016). For an unpublished research project that takes a psychological framing, see Underhill (2011).

5 In April 2013, the UK Border Agency became two units within the Home Office: UK Visas and Immigration and UK Border Force and Immigration Enforcement. The government rationale given for this change was to provide greater transparency and accountability to an agency heavily criticised for backlogs of casework and a culture of secrecy.

6 Although recent years have seen the convergence between immigration law and criminal law enforcement in the UK where, for example, entering the country using falsified documents carries immigration and criminal penalties. See Bosworth (2011) and Hasselberg (2016) for work on the detention of foreign-national prisoners in the UK, who often suffer longer and harsher punishments owing to the absence of citizenship.

7 Ashley Lucas (2013: 135) points out that while arts programmes in prisons might be labelled as confessional or rehabilatory, this framing characterises people in prison ‘as the objects of their own art rather than the agents who created it’. Instead, it continues to ‘mark them with the stigma of criminality’ (Lucas 2013: 136), not as artists in their own right.

8 These figures exclude short-term holding facilities. See the latest Home Office detention statistics at: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/immigration-detention-in-the-uk/

9 A person's particular experience of confinement in detention is analogous to multiple factors, including their length of stay in detention, their contact with family and friends, the progress on their case, etc.

Additional information

Funding

The article draws upon fieldwork conducted with support from the University of Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and St. Cross College.