Migrating Music

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.

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Sociology at The Open University. He does work on copyright and creativity, and ethnicity and the postcolonial condition. Much of his research on those issues focuses on popular music and jazz, as in his books Making Popular Music: Musicians, Institutions and Creativity (Arnold, 2000) and Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? (Polity, 2007).

Byron Dueck is University Fellow in Music at the Open University. His work focuses on the role of musical and embodied experience in constituting public cultures. The majority of his research concerns First Nations and Métis music in western Canada; other interests include Cameroonian popular music and jazz.