Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Recent public discussions of migration and refuges are typically constructed around notions of difference. Often hyped by media discourses, such constructs focus predominantly on the host society’s anxiety and moral codes as linked to ideas of deserving and undeserving when negotiating between the “familiar” and the values and behaviors of the “other.” Impelled by the displacement of individuals and collectives from Syria, Iraq, and Libya to Europe in the past years, I highlight in this paper, how music originating in the Arab World and that happening in European sonic urban and rural locales, generates original sounding representations that narrate “audible entanglements” as cultural convergences and accounts of limits and boundaries. The analysis of musical interactions between migrants and majority societies highlights, that performance potentially forms not only sounding behaviors but also altered subjectivities or identities. Such performances—adapted operas, mixed-ensemble performances, plays on the streets and the web—as fusions, sound experiments, ensembles and assemblies, co-performances, collaborations, moments of cultural resistance, and other expressions, project migrants’ and hosts’ voices as musical forms of in-betweenness. Based on ethnographic materials collected while working with performers and producers of the musical theater production Moses, a collaboration between migrants and Bavarian inhabitants by the Bavarian National Theater, migrant-opera productions made contemporary by the Zukunft Kultur, as well as Munich’ s first smart (phone) party Plug-in-Beats, I suggest that these performances allow temporary normalcies of post-migration contexts, countering popular critical voices habitually depicted by the media about the states of emergency that flight and migration can create.