New Diversities • Volume 25, No. 1, 2024Special issue: Migrating through the ArtsDeconstructing Alterities through new Approaches to Music and Dance PracticesGuest Editors: ANA LAURA RODRÍGUEZ QUIÑONES and MONIKA SALZBRUNN (University of Lausanne) |
List of Contents
Monika Salzbrunn and Ana Laura Rodríguez Quiñones (University of Lausanne)
Introduction: Migrating through the Arts: Deconstructing Alterities through new Approaches to Music and Dance Practices
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in artistic practices as a lens through which to explore inequalities, navigating the intricate dynamics of mobility, citizenship and belongingness. In particular, music and dance have emerged as illuminating pathways for reimagining migration and diversity research. This transformative perspective challenges conventional categories such as “migrant,” “migration,” “diversity,” “alterity,” “North,” and “South,” exposing their normative dimensions. It invites a reconsideration of the circulations of practices, practitioners, and representations within the realms of music and dance, prompting methodological and epistemological inquiries. How can the creativity and agency of actors be reconciled with the institutional constraints they encounter? How can the cultural hybridizations and syncretism resulting from the movements of people, creations, and information be conceptualized? In what ways does a focus on music and dance practices empower scholars in migration and diversity studies to rethink normative categories and dismantle entrenched notions of alterity? This introduction seeks to provide an overview of the compelling issues emanating from research on music and dance in the context of migration and diversity studies. It explores the novel avenues opened up by this research domain, offering a platform for critical reflections on global inequalities.
Denis Laborde (CNRS & EHESS, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin)
A Radical Concern: Advocacy for an Ingenious Anthropology of Music
In three steps, this paper suggests erecting ingenuity as a tool of investigation: Ethnomusicology in migration contexts, Strategies and tactics, Categorical assignments. Ingenuity is not to be understood as a gap in epistemic devices but as an instrument that unleashes the gaze, as a tool that aims to ensure the accuracy of observation reports, and especially as a generator of indignation that may take us out of our “comfort zone.” A comfort zone is to be understood here as a knowledge configuration that encourages us to think from established categories that assign people to the place provided for them by existing devices, forgetting to take into account the ways these categories are instituted. This leads us to pay attention to the “categorical service” that ethnomusicology’s conceptual frameworks provide to our ways of thinking.
Martin Stokes (King’s College, London)
Migrancy and Music on Film
This article discusses the Turkish-German director Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand/Duvara Karşı of 2004, John Baily’s pioneering ethnographic film Amir: An Afghan Refugee’s Life in Peshawar, Pakistan of 1985, and Palestinian artist Jumana Manna’s film-installation A Magical Substance Flows Into Me of 2016 through the lens of Mieke Bal’s concept of “migratory aesthetics”. It argues that music and sound illuminate important facets of Bal’s argument about time’s ‘materiality’ and ‘stickiness’. But the article also offers a critical perspective. The three films – respectively products of commercial cinema, academic ethnography, and contemporary curatorial culture – portray complex struggles over time and history and the masteries and skills musicians bring to such struggles, while also questioning the narrative frameworks within which migrant and refugee musicians have been conventionally represented. They suggest some of the ways in which the study of music and sound might be more effectively harnessed to contemporary perspectives on ‘the new diversities’.
Alice Aterianus-Owanga (University of Neuchâtel)
Art Worlds in Situation: Old Methods for a (New) Anthropology of Popular Music and Dance in Migration
The aim of this paper is to highlight how recent anthropological studies of musicians’ and dancers’ activities and networks in migration have attempted to theorize the links between the so-called ‘local’ and ‘global’ by both reviving older ethnographic methods and taking inspiration from recent theories and concepts in the anthropology of migration. It draws on the author’s research on the migration of Senegalese sabar dancers in Europe (mainly France and Switzerland), and on other anthropological studies developed recently about the worlds of music and dance in migration and transnational contexts. After briefly recalling the long history of the intertwining of migration studies and ethnomusicology, it focuses on two main tools that help to grasp the transnational connections and creations that emerge through music and dance and to overcome the simple dichotomy between the local and the global. These methods consist in analyses of ‘social worlds’ and ‘art worlds’ on the one hand and of ‘social situations’ on the other. It is shown how, using these tools, the anthropology of music and dance in migration can find relevant methodologies and epistemologies to overcome the local/global dichotomy and explain how ‘art worlds’ (Becker 2008 [1982]) are built into the interstices between the two scales.
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (University College London)
West African Performers and the Art of Navigating Interrupted Mobilities
In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the scholarship on the performing arts celebrated the new insights afforded by the transnationalism paradigm and the ‘mobilities’ turn. There was both enthusiasm and concern about the intensified global circulation of people, things, ideas, and capital, as well as art forms. New research questioned whether these ‘mobilities’ reinforced the postcolonial world order, or whether they had the potential to make more visible previously marginalized artistic forms, a case in point being the debates on who ‘world music’ really empowered (cf. Stokes 2004). Since then, there has been a growing recognition that a focus on mobility in its multiple forms risked obscuring important aspects of the ‘social life’ of art worlds. There is a need to reconsider the relationship between mobility and immobility, between moving and ‘staying put’ at different stages of artistic lives. How have migration regimes, which have increasingly aimed at keeping people from the Global South away from the Global North, shaped what performing artists do? How have West African dancers and choreographers in particular addressed the migration issue? Do we need to rethink the temporality of our studies? Drawing on ongoing research with performing artists in Senegal and in migration contexts since 2002, this article argues that much can be learned from the ways in which artists deploy long-term strategies to navigate a world in which their work is valued, but from which their bodies are largely excluded.
Cécile Navarro (Centre inter-cantonal d’Informations sur les Croyances, Geneva)
Power Asymmetries on the Senegalese Rap Music Scene: Migrants, the Mobile and the Immobile
Drawing on the results of an ethnographic study conducted among artists, music producers and cultural entrepreneurs of Rap in Senegal, this article aims at exploring how migration, mobility and immobility, considered within a mobilities framework, can enlighten power asymmetries within a socially and culturally diverse ‘music scene’.
The author proposes to revisit the concept of the ‘music scene’ in order to articulate how music is constructed as deeply rooted in a particular place, while at the same time being the site of multiple forms of mobility, revealing the dynamics between locality and mobility and the making of hierarchies of place.
Christian Rinaudo (Université Côte d’Azur, France)
Interconnected Scenes: Towards a Critical Approach to Mobility, Territory, Agency and Ethnicity
Since the early 2000s, the social sciences have focused on the art and migration nexus, the artistic practices of migrants in settlement societies and the role of art in migrant integration. More recently, scholars have considered the creation of global art worlds where the circulation of practices and the mobility of actors are intertwined. In this paper, I critically approach four key issues raised by this research: the articulation between different forms of mobility (migration, tourism, professional travel and artistic tours) and subject positions (artist, migrant, tourist, etc.); the emergence of migrant transnationalism as an analytical framework opening up new perspectives and methodologies centering migrants’ mobility and agency; the continued importance of territories and forms of the local as anchoring of interconnected practices and scenes; and the forging of concepts of identity and alterity developed by artists in relation to their migration experiences. In conclusion, I take these four avenues of research as representative of the ways empirical studies of artistic practices can contribute to scholarship on migration and ethnicity.
Joanna Menet (Associate Researcher, University of Neuchâtel)
Through the Lens of Salsa: Im/mobile Careers in Transnational Dance Worlds
The social sciences have long been criticized for their nation-state-centred epistemology and use of static categories in research methods. This paper presents empirical material and methodological reflections to shift our approach to studying and researching transnational dance worlds. Starting from current debates in migration and dance studies, it explores how these two distinct fields of research might fruitfully be combined. Based on ethnographic research with salsa dance professionals in Europe and Cuba, this paper introduces the notion of im/mobile careers. It explores ways in which global inequalities affect dance professionals and illuminates the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race and class. The paper highlights the contributions of a methodological approach which includes mobile research and a focus on individual life stories as well as performance. It argues for a reflexive approach to challenge the epistemological and methodological limits of current research. The paper contributes to the growing body of literature that studies social phenomena through the lens of im/mobility and empirically adds to our understanding of contemporary social processes.
Marion Fournier (University of Lorraine)
Wuppertal: Becoming a Haut Lieu and Symbolic Space of Dance through Diversity
The works of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch constitute an œuvre that has won widespread global renown since the 1970s. After joint productions and tours in cultural capitals, the company has become more and more cosmopolitan and has attracted international audiences. Consequently, the city of Wuppertal has come to occupy a position of centrality in the dance world. The concept of an haut lieu in French—translated into English by “symbolic space” and originating in geography (Debarbieux 1993)—allows us to grasp such a phenomenon. In this article, Wuppertal is considered to be an haut lieu for four reasons: it is a real and located space; it has a strong symbolic dimension and is highly valued by dancers and audiences; it generates a flow of people; and it is experienced collectively. How do these aspects intersect with diversity? The analysis discusses this nexus by focusing on the city of Wuppertal, the Lichtburg dance studio, the Pina Bausch Foundation and Tanztheater Wuppertal, as well as the theaters where the company performs.