Musicking through European migratory Spaces: Gendered, ethnic and racial place-making
Chair(s): Sonia Tamar Seeman (University of Texas Austin,)
As governments exert economic and political pressures on ethnic, gendered and racialized migrant minorities, this panel demonstrates the power of musicking to co-create new communal spaces within and around political, social and economic restrictions. Traversing diverse national horizons, these papers explore the multiple forms of sonic signification that grant migrant communities a sense of place in the context of displacement. Evicted during the Yugoslav wars, Kosovo Romani communities in Germany have leveraged musical and ritual practices to enact kin networks, share economic strategies and forge dynamic communal belonging in neighborhood spaces. Forcible expulsion of Muslim Roma and non-Roma from Greece in 1923 through the terms of the Lausanne Treaty have led to a multi-generational celebration of “immigrant” (mu[h]cir) senses of belonging. Romani female gendered musical work and social reproduction helps to secure the economic health of families as well as transmit sonic archives for patron communities. Persian female Christian immigrants to Europe and the US have created emergent religious practices that engender belonging in the face of Iranian state repression. Persian female religious musical traditions produce community-building affect that convert 6/8 dance rhythms into spiritual joy. The final study examines the experiences of diverse immigrant communities in Würzburg, Germany as they navigate policing of musicking in public spaces revealing strategies by which authorities and minorities negotiate class and color lines through sound. Together these studies demonstrate the productive qualities of musicking to generate public place-making and new political discourses in the face of restrictive economic, political and social structures.
Presentations in the Session
Performative Social Space: Trauma, Ritual, and Music among Kosovo Romani Migrants in Germany
Carol Silverman
University of Oregon
Via music, Kosovo Romani refugees from the 1999 Yugoslav war performatively navigate their emplaced relationship between their former homes and their new locations in Germany. These migrants have ambivalent sentiments both about Kosovo (a mixture of nostalgia, violence, revulsion, and trauma) and Germany (a mixture of safety, insecurity, and racial intolerance) but music has been a continual symbol of their identity. Most never want to return due to violent evictions and confiscated properties. In Germany, some display the effects of PTSD in terms of interpersonal hostilities and medical problems. After 30 years some are being deported as “unworthy” migrants, as state policies change, responding to the influx of new refugees. The Romani diaspora embraces multiple European urban locations, and everywhere music is a prime communicative node. One Dortmund neighborhood has emerged as a center of cultural and Muslim religious life. Performative displays embedded in large celebrations (using outdoor space) creatively enact an urban imaginary via music and dance. Embodying affective modalities in ritual, they reaffirm their sense of belonging to a Romani community. I trace the “intimacy of neighborhood and politics of the state” (Gray 2011) via community music and dance events such as weddings and circumcision parties that require huge monetary outlays and intense planning. I also analyze the repertoire and migratory lives of wedding band members who are often the most mobile members of their communities. These ritual music events (in banquet halls rather than homes) reconfigure urban space by invigorating kinship networks in a European-wide Romani diaspora.
Re-creating “Mu[h]acir” [“Immigrant”] through Women’s Work: Musicking and Social Reproduction
Sonia Tamar Seeman
University of Texas Austin
Musicking sustains communities by re-creating place and belonging in times of adversity. What are the underlying structures that make such resilience possible? This time-depth study over 5 generations/100 years during forced migrations from Greece to varied sites within Türkiye reveals the intertwined relationship between guild-based training, kin-based economic systems and affective musical mediations that secure senses of belonging across changing terrains for musicians as well as their clients. As the backbone of Türkiye’s commercial and state-sponsored musical production, most Turkish Romani professional musicians immigrated from Bulgaria, Greece and Macedonia prior to and as part of ethnonational state formation. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty enforced the cruel “exchange” of Muslim and Christian populations across new national borders. The subsequent creation and maintenance of “mu[h]acir” (immigrant) has been fixed by musical repertoires, rituals, residency patterns and marriage ties maintained by Romani musician families. The societal reproduction of this affective musical labor has been sustained and inflected as much by the hidden labor of women as by the more visible and audible labor of male Romanis. In addition to their significant musical contributions, the choices and accommodations in these women’s lives illustrate the unrecognized work and labor of women in sustaining societal as well as social reproduction (Aruzza 2016). By drawing upon Romani women’s words and co-witnessing, this essay heeds the “…practice of witnessing, of testimony, as providing… evidence of the pain, bodily marks, joy, and everyday existence that mark one’s place in the world” (Hogdson and Brooks 2007: 141).
Women, Musicking, and Freedom in the Created Space of Church
Golriz Shayani
N/a
This paper examines the affective and spiritual labor of women in diasporic Persian-speaking churches, exploring this migratory created space as a haven for previous damaging experiences and ongoing constraints for women. Insightful scholarship (Hemmasi 2017, 2020; Debano 2009, 2013; Mozafari 2012; Nooshin 2011; Siamdoust 2021, 2023; Youssefzadeh 2000, 2004, 2015) on women’s everyday practices within Iran and its diaspora have examined how music-making and dancing are acts of defiance against gender discrimination and spaces for negotiating gender roles. While existing scholarship highlights women’s agency in their pursuit of “freedom” and human rights, the concept of freedom and its potential consequences require further scrutiny. This paper explores how women in the diaspora exercise agency and freedom through adherence to religious principles. I argue that Persian-speaking Christian women’s spiritual and political capacity emerges from embodying Christian moral principles and gender roles. To support my claim, I utilize my participant observations (2021-2023) from Nowruz celebrations in Persian-speaking churches in the US and my interviews with women pastors in Sweden. While Anglo-American missionaries in the nineteenth century and later Armenian Christians influenced Christian practices and music in Iran, Sweden and the US have now become centers of musical production and religious practice for Persian-speaking Christians. In this context, Persian-speaking Christian women leverage their new faith system and diasporic space to reclaim and redefine their authority within both musical and religious practices. Focusing on gendered musical labor reveals how musicking shapes collective subjectivity, transforms past restrictions, and sustains community amid geopolitical borders and forced migration.
Post-Migrant Musicking and the Restriction of Public Space: Sonic color and class lines in provincial Germany
Juniper Hill, Cornelia Guenauer
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
“I would just go down to the riverside and play music on a park bench and the kids would come – until I got banned in my own town, I got a cease-and-desist letter from the mayor.” So lamented José Sanchez, an Irish fiddler with Puerto Rican heritage and long-time resident of Würzburg, Germany. We explore how José and other post-migrant musicians experience sonic policing and how classism and cultural racism affect artists’ access to public space. Since 2020 we have conducted ethnographic research in Würzburg, interviewing 55 musicians and dancers with diverse backgrounds. This conservative Bavarian town has a population of 130,000, of whom over one third are first- or second-generation immigrants from across five continents. Musicking in public spaces is often essential for musicians with migration background to network and establish themselves in their new home. Unfortunately, artists, particularly those who do not pass as white or as European, often experience increased restriction of musicking in public and have difficulty accessing spaces for musicking and dancing. The city often associates music in public with negative behaviors such as littering, begging, drug use, and nuisance and the law on “unacceptable noise” leaves much leeway for (potentially biased) interpretations. Our questionnaire in progress aims to further reveal how diverse cultural expressions are differently curated and controlled in public spaces. We expand on theories of sonic policing along class lines (Stoever 2016) and color lines (Bijsterveld 2008, 2001; Dommann 2006) as well as European shifts between “biological” and “cultural” racism (Alcoff 2023).
