Contenu
"In much of Western Europe and the US, Muslim migrants are often represented as symbols of multiculturalism's failure, portrayed as self-segregating, backward, and as adhering to orthodox forms of Islam that prohibit music. In practice, Muslim migrants--particularly those from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir--occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphor, that are central to how they survive their migratory journeys. In this project, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson explores the ways that Pakistanis in England from the Mirpur region of Kashmir carry on traditions of reciting a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century Sufi saint, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, translated by Hodgson as "Journeys of Love." With its themes of remaining true to one's home, of the oppressed being saved from the oppressor, and of the need to be patient, to keep faith in God, the poems are highly valued by Kashmiris in Pakistan and in Britain. The verses are performed and sung regularly at weddings and festivals and recited in day-to-day life everywhere from taxis and barbershops to people's homes. This collection of poems has thus become the story of movement and displacement, not only in terms of its narrative arc, but through the way it has provided a spiritual and ethical framework for settling in new lands. It is this musical life as it exists across borders today that he describes as the poetics of migration. But the tradition as performed in England is notably removed from the public eye. While the British media takes this as a sign of Mirpuris disinterest in British life, Hodgson instead argues that expressions of Mirpuri culture are often intentionally hidden from public view. In urban environments in which the rhetoric of integration dominates political agenda and news cycles, Kashmiris have had good reason to develop strategies of economic, social, and cultural self-reliance. Hodgson shows that the hidden poetics of Kashmiri music-making thus provide a more contemporarily relevant picture of migration and multiculturalism than one drawn along ethnic or religious lines alone. The poetics of migration reveals sensory and affective connections between Kashmir's rural village life and urban centers abroad that allow us to situate current debates about nationalism within the longer history, and future, of multiculturalism in Britain and beyond"--