Music, Forced Migration and Emplacement

“This immense achievement is a beautiful, finely-tuned ethnography attentive to the intensities and necro-politics of asylum in England. Music pulses here as a cadence in the art of living for refugees to articulate sounds, poetry, rhythms, and fragments of coming together amid slow violence, texturing what typically goes unnoticed in normative accents of displacement.” 

- Nichola Khan, Professor of Human Geography and Ethnography, The University of Edinburgh.

“Nicola De Martini Ugolotti weaves together theoretical considerations with ethnographic details, capturing important stories that speak to the affective intensities of pleasure, homing desires, and abject fear experienced and re-claimed in the UK hostile environment.” 

- Aarti Ratna, Associate Professor in Sociology and Social Sciences, Northumbria University

“This book offers vital engagements with questions of migration, music, and leisure. Finely-textured ethnographic content and a wealth of academic scholarship showcase why music and leisure matter toward understanding the politics, spaces, and lives of people seeking sanctuary and belonging in contemporary Britain, and beyond.” 

- Brett Lashua, Lecturer in Sociology of Media and Education, University College London

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, UK, 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 to address “what goes unnoticed” in existing ways of thinking about forced migration.

By looking at the junctures where leisure, forced migration and urban analyses intersect with grassroot solidarity with and by people seeking asylum, it offers an interdisciplinary reading of music, forced migration and emplacement for scholars across leisure, anthropology, sociology, and geography. This book contributes and provokes novel discussions regarding refugees’ everyday experiences and negotiations of precariousness, suspension, and marginality in Britain.

Nicola De Martini Ugolotti is Senior Lecturer in Sport and Physical Culture at Bournemouth University, UK and member of Associazione Frantz Fanon in Turin, Italy.