Migrants bring music from the homeland to the metropolis. But music also migrates via the media: 'world' music, hip hop, bossa nova ... . With case studies from across the world this ground-breaking collection shows how migrating music is key to the construction of a still-emerging, global cosmopolitan imagination.
Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on 'world music' questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre - but says relatively little about migration and mobility - diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music.
In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals - and even exceeds - literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms.
This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.
'This volume about migrant musicians, listeners, and styles is essential reading for students of music and migration...it is especially timely in its focus on a significant sub-section of the discipline...[I]t covers a wide geographical and social range, a variety of styles, and offers an excellent overview of the cross-cultural issues that confront migrant urban musicians.' - Ilana Webster-Kogen, Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2012
'To its credit, the volume is even-handed in covering music that resonates across the generations. It's enlightening to learn of what older Afghanis who have fled their wartorn country are tuning into...'-Leonard Nevarez on musicalurbanism.blogspot.co.uk, posted 28 June 2012
