A Landscape of Memories through the Music of Hope Lee (July 2018) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
Much practical knowledge resides in places of higher education where it has been accumulated by performers and scholars who have institutional access to both infrastructure and networking. While access to this kind of knowledge is a privilege that asylum seekers and refugees seldom possess, harsh real-life experience (e.g., forced migration) is usually something that academics lack. We must therefore ask: How can we bring these two realms into a productive relationship? In particular, is it possible to generate knowledge in an equal partnership and, if so, how? By jointly presenting our collaborative work, we hope to demonstrate how researchers' advocacy can benefit lesser privileged artists without falling into the trap of paternalism. Combining an artistic and a theoretical approach, we will address both mobility and location as essential components of musical identity construction. Of particular interest is the construction and performance of a sense of home, place, and memory in the context of migration and displacement.
2022
This text was originally a brief contemplation on the conversations, debates and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the Souths that occurred in August 2022 at the Akademie Der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more artists would probably keep crossing the borders to land in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text I describe both groups as migrant sounds: those who actually migrated and those who managed to project their voices beyond the border, even if they never physically crossed it. Considering the socio-political complexities of our time and the conditions of the migrant sounds, I believe we can still extend the arguments of this text to other artistic disciplines in similar situations. Yet, the ambivalences of the art of the migrant voices, especially those of the sound artists and composers, still begs further inquiry, to which this text serves as nothing but a preliminary step.
Handing the Mic to the Mosaic: Lessons on Race from Canadian Music Artists of Colour
2020
One of Canada’s most notable traits as a nation-state is its policy of multiculturalism or its national identity as a “cultural mosaic”. In this research-creation project, 11 music artists of colour from Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver were asked how multiculturalism affects their cultural identities and music-making practices. This research builds on existing work that has lauded music as a valuable site for studying race relations within Canada. Investigating Canadian multiculturalism as an active political ideology, this project comprises both a written analysis and podcast series. Multiculturalism is mediated diversity which distracts away from the inherent whiteness at the centre of the colonial settler-state. As an ideology and dominant discourse, it filters down into infrastructures and everyday interactions. This project points to some of the ways that this occurs for artists of colour, namely through the static and single-layered dimensional framings of their work. On top o...
2020
The current sense of crisis in the study of migration and music calls out for a broader contextualization. The study of migrant culture sat comfortably for a while with a structural-functionalist culture concept emphasizing boundedness and stasis, figured as transitional, adaptive, evidence of modernization or Westernization. An orientation toward hybridity in the 1980s began to shake some of these certainties, even if it kept others (the normative framework of the nation-state) in place. This article argues that work on refugees and diasporas at around the same time departed from them more radically. The current moment is one in which the final vestiges of language about migrant culture as adaptive have been swept away and in which the populist evocation of a migrant crisis at our gates has posed unsettling challenges. This article explores the tensions in the current literature between an emphasis on migrant creativity and survival, mobility and motility, and identity and citizens...
This paper reads select passages from Kamau Brathwaite and Louise Bennett by examining arrival and migration as intense moments in the archives of Caribbean poetry. For these poets, the Caribbean is both a home for immigrants but also a source of emigration. At the same time, thinking about the failures of language, Caribbean writers suggest that poetry is an opportunity for an archive to sound anew with revitalized performances. As Brathwaite writes, language becomes “a howl or a shout or a machine gun or the wind or a wave.” This paper suggests that poetry turns the failed speech and impossible sounds of dispersed peoples to the revitalized repository of linguistic archives.
Diaspora as method, music as hope
In November 2013, something unusual happened during the television show Holland’s Got Talent. To begin with, a person with a Chinese background participated in a talent show dominated by white, and to a lesser extent, black bodies. After Wang Xiao, a Chinese research student in the Netherlands, finished his performance, he was greeted with a laughing articulation of “surplise” by a jury member Gordon, a white Dutch singer. 1 The articulation, a stereotyping reference to the presumed Chinese difficulty to pronounce the “r” sound, was followed by more racist remarks, including the most cited “Which number are you singing? Number 39 with rice?”.