Research Themes and Projects
Migrating Music (Jason Toynbee)
BBCWS music broadcasting is cultural brokerage which creates cross-diasporic contact zones with broad and deep affective and social impact.
Three factors differentiate music from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-diasporic exchange: portability yet cultural rootedness, ambiguity as a marker of status across borders, and the combination of aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. This research examines how BBCWS mediates music and identity flows across the world. Issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in this programming, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programmes in which music is played and discussed.
Particular attention will be given to "the Black Atlantic" (Gilroy, 1998): the itinerary of west African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilisation with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. More recently, African music has come directly to the UK, for example, South African kwela, Our focus will be on the role of BBCWS as narrator of this Black Atlantic story. A complementary zone of cross-diasporic contact is that of South Asian "cross-over" musics from bhangra to filmi. These can be studied best among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean, where they now interact with reggae, calypso, "Rapso" and "Popso". The transversal movement of musics and lyrics between the Irish at home and in the diaspora will provide further comparative material.
We study the role of the BBCWS in these migrations through: (i) discourse analysis of presenters' speech, programme trailers and dialogue, to examine the targeting of audiences, and the BBC's own construction of "world music"; (ii) semiotic analysis of recordings and performances to assess the significance of movement and migration as themes in the music played on BBCWS.; (iii) focused interviews with people involved in music programming, including musicians, in order analyse how creative personnel understand their own role in the construction of a thematic of musical migration and movement.