Conference Abstracts
36. Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna; Southampton University,
UK:
"Transnationalism and cultural capital"
This workshop/ symposium consists of 3 interlinking
papers by Nadia Kiwan, Ulrike H. Meinhof, and Zafimahaleo Rasolofondraosolo,
based on research conducted as part of an EU Fifth Framework project
on Changing City Spaces: New Challenges to Cultural Policy in Europe.
An important part of our project investigates the relationship-
its interpenetration or discrepancy - between 'top-down' cultural
policies directed towards cultural diversity in Europe and the 'bottom-up'
creative energy of im-migrant populations in post-colonial capital
cities in Europe. Our theoretical reflections will be grounded in
two comparative and contrastive case studies with immigrant musicians
living in Paris who are originating from the Maghreb (especially
from Morocco and Algeria) and Madagascar, and of musicians from
the Maghreb and Madagascar who pass through Paris as part of a transnational
'world music' circuit.
Paper 1
Ulrike Hanna Meinhof: Transnationalism and cultural capital
The first paper by Ulrike Meinhof establishes the theoretical basis
for understanding the effects of global flows of migration by focusing
on the city as a conceptual frame of reference. It establishes the
basis for the two consecutive case studies of two very different
migrant networks, interlinking Paris as a post-imperial city with
its post-colonial counterparts in Morocco, Algeria and in Madagascar
It argues that the
cultural diversity of the contemporary city makes the city rather
than the nation state into a powerful conceptual tool for imagining
the interconnections and interdependencies of the contemporary world.
Cities are places of negotiation, encounter and new creative energies,
but equally of social exclusion and seclusion. Whilst there is a
great deal of theoretical understanding of the significance of modern
city spaces and their transnational interconnectivities and flows
, there is still a lack of
detailed empirical work which connects these concepts to the practical
everyday reality of the diverse people living in the cities. Researchers
of particular ethnically defined im-migrant groups and their locally
and transnationally interconnecting networks, for example, need
to be alert to the methodological risk that such framing devices
may reinforce traditional notions of diasporically displaced but
internally cohesive ethnic communities. With our detailed studies
of particular sub-groups of
im-migrants - those of musicians and the cultural actors who support
them - we can demonstrate the ways in which strategically activated,
locally and transnationally managed networks constitute in fact
a powerful transcultural capital which is rewarding in socio-cultural
as well as economic terms. In strategically using cultural and linguistic
diversity and multiple transnational affiliations, im-migrant artists
and other cultural agents can successfully circumvent the pressures
of total assimilation into a new nation state on the one hand, and
free-floating cosmopolitanism on the
other. Ethnic, cultural and national origin as well as multiple
local, transnational and multi-cultural affiliations thus can provide
a repertoire of options. In that sense the musicians and cultural
actors that we studied may well be amongst the prime examples for
a genuine structural transformation of the transnational public
and private sphere.
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