PERFORMING CRITICAL VOICE: ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF CITIZENSHIP, BELONGING, AND THE ARTICULATION OF CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUES (original) (raw)
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Transcultural Engagement in Protest Music as a Method of Scene -Zapruder World
Zapruder World, 2023
In activism, music plays a crucial role in disturbing oppressive spaces, actors, and institutions. Activists credit the communicative function of music to create solidarity among different people at demonstrations 1. Music has a specific value in this space. On the one hand, music makes possible pleasurable bodily experiences. On the other hand, the tapestry of music and chants in the activist setting enable the formation of an imagined stage that can be elevated or on street level. From that stage, the desired political encounter can take place, can be seen, and experienced together. The stage is crucial in the activist dramaturgy. As part of that, music helps create a scene in which the political struggle can come into existence visibly and audibly. The musical coulisse sets in motion a dialogue between audience and performers. This dialogue is felt bodily, but the method in which the dialogue is staged also reveals that there is a political function assigned to music. Music is supposed to encourage and enable the audience to recognize ways in which injustices can be called attention to and unmasked creatively and collectively. This way of using music shows the audience how injustices work to sustain themselves. Music serves to unveil the theatricality of the phenomenological world, and with that seeks to encourage action from the audience. Jacques Rancière’s has discussed this method of unveiling as the “method of scene” 2. This paper investigates such methods through the example of musically assisted anti-right-wing activism that has been taking place in the city of Dresden, Germany via the work of the brass collective Banda Comunale. The methods of scene that musicians use in this protest setting are the focus of this paper and specific attention will be paid to the role that transcultural engagement takes. Banda Comunale has been active in musical street activism since 2001 but became the prominent opponent to the right-wing-movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) that took hold of the city of Dresden in 2015. When thousands of Pegida supporters marched the city’s streets, calling for anti-immigration policies and a removal of supportive measures for migrants from Syria, Banda Comunale played international brass classics to recode the city’s sonic tapestry and sonically drown out right-wing chants. The function of the music was to use the cultural heritage with which the band associated the newly settled residents to demonstrate that the people from Syria and other places in the Global South had a right to establish a home in Dresden. Banda Comunale’s music in the streets and on stages throughout the city came to symbolize the possibility of arriving and making a life for oneself in the city despite strong and growing resistance from right-wing groups. My contribution draws on my 2017-20 ethnographic study of the ensemble that revealed Banda Comunale deeply engaged in aesthetic debates on multiculturalism and transnational connections in music to fuel the band’s visibility as a blueprint for social integration through music and music as a pathway to the right to belong. In this paper, I argue that understanding Banda Comunale’s musical aesthetic through looking at the band’s dramaturgy in protest encounters reveals how the band’s music unveils right-wing propaganda, and how it stages transcultural music to give migrants and refugees the opportunity to be seen and heard in political terms. Along with this critical reflection, I provide narrative map via www.soundofheimat.wordpress.com that tracks the transformative process of Banda Comunale’s music in relation to the ever-changing political landscape in Dresden.
Staging citizenship: Artistic performance as a site of contestation of citizenship
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
While there is already a solid body of work on the lived dimensions of citizenship, little is known about whether artistic performance in popular culture and the arts can constitute a site for staging and contesting citizenship. In this article, I argue that the literatures on voice and citizenship need to pay more attention to what performance studies approaches can offer to the study and understanding of practices of citizenship, and suggest that an expanded notion of voice as an act of self-expression, which is not purely discursive, is needed for understanding citizenship as embodied and expressive practice. By combining interview data with textual analysis, I employ performance tools and concepts from performance studies to analyse how citizenship is staged and contested in the documentary film Wait and the performance Welcome to Dreamland.
Singing our own song: Navigating identity politics through activism in music
Research Studies in Music Education, 2018
This work builds upon considerations of musicking that suggest processes of performing, creating, listening, and producing of music are sites for identity formation and meaning-making activities. In this project, I interviewed 20 activist-musicians about the following dimensions of identity and meaning-making in their work: (a) how they view the role of (their) music; (b) how they situate themselves in their work; and (c) what they believe are the implications of their work for music education, based on (d) their own experiences of music. I draw on Said’s counterpoint as an analytical tool to hold conflicting identities and issues in tension without false resolution. Significantly, the majority of the activist-musicians who participated in the study saw music not only as a means of identity formation, but also as a site to engage in, express, and formulate identity politics. Together, these elements have substantive implications for music education. In imagining an activist school m...
Citizenship Studies, 2016
Conceptualizing citizenship as an act rather than a status enables us to rethink the familiarity of both 'who' can be a citizen and of the 'type' of practices that can be understood as citizenship. This paper explores the liminal site from which intergenerational migrant youth resist the taken-for-granted space of citizenship through a turn towards vernacular music and language, and doing so focuses on unfamiliar acts of citizenship per se. It considers how citizenship is resisted here through the unfamiliar act of turning away from either identifying or, failing/refusing to identify with the nation-state. It explores the effect of this move in challenging narrow national linguistic and ethnic ideologies through the development of non-standard language practice and cross-cutting musical styles. It argues that citizenship is enacted in this move by creating a space in vernacular music and language for expressions of hybrid political identity and belonging.
Music-making and forced migrants’ affective practices of diasporic belonging
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020
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.
Sound and Activism: Listening and Responsibility
Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, 2022
Can sound be a platform for activism? Beyond the possibilities of articulating cultural discourses of representation, can sound intervene to trigger changes in the status quo of those withstanding the pressures of marginality? ese questions lie at the core of this themed issue of Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, shedding light on the political potential of sound and aurality to contest the asymmetrical e ects of power. In the last decade, scholars have alerted us to how the neoliberal movement of capital not only de-(and re-)territorialized identity discourses through the global circulation of practices, symbols, meanings, and people; this ux also underscored the importance of aural messages in the production of cultural capital in globalization. is "intensi cation of the aural," it has been argued, points to the increased importance of sound and aurality to frame the experience of modernity. In our current global cultural moment, such intensi cation has made graphic print and silent reading just one instance of the process of signi cation. Yet, as with any text, aural records are sensitive to power imbalances that permeate the social relationships in which writer, reader, and text move. In this regard, Karen Dubinsky and Freddy Monasterio remind us that cultural texts can remain framed in the signifying logics of exoticized di erence. In their piece about Cuban music without Cubans, the authors warn about how cultural exoticism can pin identitarian discourse in a politics of di erence, where identity emerges only in relation to commodity value, moving in a symbolic economy of desire. In contrast, Olivia E. Holloway broaches aurality as a performative strategy to redress cultural symbols and the narratives they articulate. In her piece about women and feminist activism in capoeira, the author reads cultural practice not as a peripheral representational discourse. For female capoeira practitioners, music and sound enable performative spaces to intervene traditional male capoeira narratives. Performance rewrites capoeira as a cultural text and reframes gender in response to women's intervention. us, aurality and performance revalorize capoeira's discursive potential.
In our era of globalised mass migration, traditional notions of citizenship are becoming increasingly contested. As several scholars have argued [Matthew J Gibney, Linda Bosniak], the existing juridical model of citizenship no longer account for the experiences and existences of those who move at the-real and symbolic-margins of nation states and their human rights regimes, such as, for example, asylum seekers, refuges and undocumented migrants. At the same time, post-migrant societies, for example, are shaped by individuals who might hold citizenship rights but are still perceived as other, owing to ethnicised and racialised perceptions of national belonging. And these perceptions can result in the revocation of their rights, as the recent Windrush scandal in the UK has demonstrated. It therefore appears as though we need to renegotiate notions citizenship, belonging and participation for our contemporary moment of mass and post-migration. While work of this kind is currently being undertaken in Politics and the Social Sciences [Nando Sigona, Engin Isin], it is interesting that some theorists turn to artistic traditions-such as for example the Greek tragedy but also theatre more broadly-to think through the complexities of citizenship and belonging in the 21 st century [Bonnie Honig, David Wiles]. This suggests that the Arts might hold important insights to these debates, which have so far remained underexplored. The Arts might on the one hand provide us with historical models that allow us to question, de-naturalise and modify out contemporary political categories. On the other hand, the Arts provide spaces of experimentation and (re-)creation that also allow us to think (about) alternative models of political participation. This one-day workshop wants to explore the role and contribution of the Arts in contemporary discussions of citizenship. What alternative models of belonging, membership and participation can we find in the Arts? How do the Arts potentially challenge our existing
This volume brings together for the first time book chapters, articles and position pieces from the debates on music and identity, which seek to answer classic questions such as: how has music shaped the ways in which we understand our identities and those of others? In what ways has scholarly writing about music dealt with identity politics since the Second World War? Both classic and more recent contributions are included, as well as material on related issues such as music's role as a resource in making and performing identities and music scholarship's ambivalent relationship with scholarly activism and identity politics. The essays approach the music-identity relationship from a wide range of methodological perspectives, ranging from critical historiography and archival studies, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, to ethnography and anthropology, and social and cultural theories drawn from sociology; and from continental philosophy and Marxist theories of class to a range of globalization theories. The collection draws on the work of Anglophone scholars from all over the globe, and deals with a wide range of musics and cultures, from the Americas, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This unique collection of key texts, which deal not just with questions of gender, sexuality and race, but also with other socially-mediated identities such as social class, disability, national identity and accounts and analyses of inter-group encounters, is an invaluable resource for music scholars and researchers and those working in any discipline that deals with identity or identity politics.
Rethinking musical cosmopolitanism as a visceral politics of sound
Sounding Places: More-than-representational geographies of sound and music, 2019
This chapter is about musical interventions in public space and their role in the visceral politics of collective life. The ubiquitous presence of music across the spaces and situations of everyday life makes it a fruitful terrain for exploring the constitution, maintenance, and regulation of the nature of social situations. The chapter draws on the ongoing conceptualization of a ‘musical cosmopolitanism’ which has been debated considerably across the field of musicology, and puts it in relation with work in human geography which has engaged with music and sound from the perspective of non-representational theory. This results in a rethinking of cosmopolitanism in relation to sound and music, which understands the political potential of music as realized within the mundane goings-on of everyday spaces through the concept of visceral politics, as one way that music might matter in the transformation of social situations.