Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013

In the contemporary world, a considerable number of artists are on the move, due to the triple processes of globalization, decolonization and migration. Migrant artists, and also cosmopolitan artists that travel widely, are transnational cultural workers with ties to several places. As ‘bridging persons’, migrant artists have more than one sense of home, and they play a seminal role in the translation between cultures, and in the transformations between the local and the global. However, the multiple cultural references in their works also raise the difficult question of the provenance of their art. This article addresses the issue of how transnational cultural memory is articulated in works by migrant artists, as well as how to access it analytically. After outlining the general issues concerning the impact of migration on contemporary art, the article explores the usefulness of three conceptual frameworks: hybridity (Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall); migratory aesthetics (Mieke Bal); and the notion of the work of art as a migrant’s event (Syed Manzurul Islam). Taking British Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum as my example, it is my contention that her exhibition ‘Interior Landscape’ (Venice, 2009) constitutes a migrant’s event.

Urban folk is an emerging trend in popular music in Bangladesh, which has become prevalent in audio media quite recently with, among others, the emergence of a new generation of artists and musicians. The present article explores the relationship between popular music and the experience of migration by looking at the lyrical contents of a number of urban folk songs and is particularly interested in the metaphoric reconstruction at work within urban folk music that acts to signify the formation of new cultural identity for rural migrants in Dhaka city.

Empirical work on cosmopolitanism has, to a large extent, focused on the preconditions for and character of cosmopolitan practices. Drawing on interviews with Swedish skilled migrants in the Netherlands, this article contributes to the cosmopolitan research by focusing on the socially structured variety of cosmopolitan practices. Based on an understanding of cosmopolitanism as an active and reflexive process of sociocultural identifications, this article argues that there is a range of cosmopolitanisms, built on an elective relationship to place of residence, country of origin and transnational socialities. Hence, there is no universal cosmopolitan logic but different sets of cosmopolitan practices that are related to migrants’ biographies and lifestyles and, therefore, expressed in different fields and contexts of social space.

This article argues that the public space of theatre in an immigrant language can contribute to making immigrants and their offspring feel at home in the host country. In France, however, there is little public support for theatre in immigrant languages, since it is perceived as segregating immigrants from French cultural spaces and encouraging communautarisme, or the fragmentation of society along ethnic or religious lines, thus violating the spirit of equality inscribed in the constitution. Through interviews with the Turkish-French theatre group Kebab Show and analysis of their plays, this article argues that what anti-communautaristes see as theatre intended to segregate immigrant communities may instead contribute to making them at home in France. For older members of the community, native-language theatre provides a bridge between the country of origin and France. For their children and grandchildren born in France, this native-language theatre publicly acknowledges a part of themselves that is usually relegated to private home spaces. Filled with word play and humorous situations that require knowledge of both Turkish and French cultures, such theatre suggests the important role that native and bilingual theatre can play in the process of helping all the generations of an immigrant community feel at home.

In the current context of increased interactions with multiple mobilities, the acceleration of communication and the permeability of cultural borders multiply the benchmarks for people, ideas and discourses. It changes communication, ways to mobilize public opinion and mechanisms of dissemination and influence to situate action and reaction, senses of belongings and ruptures, trends and counter-trends. Making the connection between idea-makers and decision-makers, between theory and practice, is the aim of think tanks, those laboratories of ideas at the service of society. How can we link the social fabric with research and political actions? How can we avoid distrust with the necessary marketing of proposals and conclusions certified by think tanks to get the media’s attention? Discourses connect ideas with people, and in the time of global processes they have to be analysed through an interdisciplinary perspective in order to question the theory and the practice, the contexts and the flows. Think tanks can be the mediators for the renewal and transnationalization of research with the participation of social actors – professionals of justice, communication and young researchers – in parallel processes that are mutually influenced. This research/action raises the existence of an excessive usage of ‘containers’ concept in discourses, in which anything that creates incertitude can fit. In this way, the discourse related to migration has to be renovated and renewed. Words such as difference, identity and diversity can describe migration either as a problem or a solution, but always highlight it as being ab-normal and as being a global reaction to new realities. How can we imagine scenarios for action in which we all can move in one social framework beyond nacional boudearies? This article questions the role of think tanks from a reality in which a variety of opinions, perspectives and practices exist without coinciding in one single analysis.

Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent, Matthew Carr (2012) London: Hurst & Company, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1849042536 (hbk), £15.00