Music, Forced Migration and Emplacement

This book analyses the negotiation of place, belonging and uncertainty enacted by a group of 60 men and women seeking asylum who gathered weekly in a community space in Bristol, Britain, to share songs, memories, laughter, and precariousness with other established and new city-dwellers. Building on a rich corpus of ethnographic data, this book explores music-making as an entry point to address "what goes unnoticed" in existing ways of thinking about forced migration. Probing the boundaries between different theoretical orientations, this book locates its discussion where leisure, forced migration and urban analyses intersect with grassroot solidarity with and by people seeking asylum. Via an in-depth exploration of the entanglement of sounds, things, places, power, and subjectivities, De Martini Ugolotti offers an interdisciplinary reading of music, forced migration and emplacement for scholars across leisure, anthropology, sociology, and geography. Through this interdisciplinarylens, this book contributes and provokes novel discussions regarding refugees' everyday experiences and negotiations of precariousness, suspension, and marginality in Britain.