Music-making and forced migrants’ affective practices of diasporic belonging

ABSTRACT

Amid the normalisation of xenophobic narratives surrounding migration, and an overarching ‘hostile environment’ regulating asylum in Britain, this paper explores music-making as a unique lens to highlight the negotiation of belonging, uncertainty and marginality amongst a group of fifty forced migrants in Bristol. Through a focus addressing the nexus between power, affect and the everyday, this paper discusses how the dehumanising processes that characterise the British asylum regime operate in and through the spaces, bodies and objects constituting its ‘ordinary’ materiality. Concurrently, this paper addresses how the entanglement of bodies, ‘things’ and sounds emerging from the co-creation of weekly music groups enabled the group participants to negotiate pleasure, expression and sociality in a context of enforced marginality and uncertainty. Consequently, this paper discusses the music-making sessions as affective practices of diasporic belonging: relationalities arising from multiple forms of displacement that enabled momentary, but productive domains of sociability, co-presence and solidarity beyond ethnic, national, gendered and religious lines. The conclusions consider the contributions of theoretical approaches enabling researchers (and potentially advocates and community organisers) to recognise the stakes and significance of forced migrants’ (in)visible forms of sociality that take place beside the discursive and institutional frames of State and humanitarian interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• forced migration
• affect
• materiality
• diaspora

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Leisure Studies Association 2018 and British Sociological Association 2019 annual conferences, and to seminar audiences at Bournemouth University, and University of Brighton. My thanks to the organisers and audiences at each of these forums for their constructive engagement with my work. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The paper has also benefitted at different stages from the insights of Ian Jones, Nichola Khan, and Aarti Ratna, my thanks to you all. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to all the men and women who animated and (still animate) the music group for their time, care and patience during this research.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 As described by Darling (2014), Canning (2019), Mayblin et al. (2020).

2 Asylum-seekers live with a £37.67 weekly allowance while waiting for their asylum response. A daily bus ticket is £5. Any form of support to asylum seekers is stopped when refugee status is recognised as they become eligible for welfare support. It is common for refugees to live in destitution and homelessness while waiting for the receipt of council accommodation and welfare support. According to Bristol council figures, around 140 refugees live in destitution in the city (Bristol City Council 2017). Several of the group participants were destitute/homeless at some point while participating to the groups.

3 The community venue that hosted the group, Hamilton House, was evicted between March and December 2018 to be transformed in residential apartments.

4 The music-group had resumed its weekly sessions in Bristol from October 2019 with similar support from Borderlands and Refugee Week Festival charities;

5 Children between few months and eight years old also occasionally attended the groups, mainly with their mothers.

6 Sudan, China, Cambodia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Taiwan, Mali, Vietnam, India, Uganda, Great Britain, Italy, Peru.

7 The harmful gendered implications of asylum policies have been addressed by Mountz (2011); Schmoll (2014); Baillott and Connelly (2018); Canning (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bournemouth University and by the Leisure Studies Association ‘Research and Enterprise Development’ Fund.