From Diaspora to Intersectional Performative Mobilities: Music-making in Transcultural Balkan Romani Communities

Abstract

The scholarship on migration has traversed profound shifts in the last fifty years from immigration studies in the 1970s, to diaspora studies 1980s, to transnational and transborder studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, and to mobility studies in the last ten years. I explore if and how each of these theoretical frameworks can explain the musical lives of Southern Balkan Romani migrants. Balkan Roma have created a trans-Atlantic community with hubs located in Germany, New York, and Toronto. Their migration patterns depend on economic and political factors, as well as state and local policies; these in turn are embedded in hierarchical structures that have racialized and marginalized Roma. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, I illustrate the multiple identities of Romani performers and consumers via cultural productions. I examine music as a window into community expression that reveals dilemmas of migration, work, family, gender, and class, as well as historical remembering. Music is highly valued in all social occasions and part of the ritual and economic web, and many lyrics deal with migration. Music is shared in a wide transAtlantic social media network that forms the soundscape of Balkan Romani migrant family and community life. In fact, professional musician-stars are the most mobile members of their communities. Their training, repertoire, and performative strategies provide insights into transculturality across the Atlantic. Ethnographic fieldwork took place among Macedonian and Kosovo Roma in the Balkans, USA, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia since 1988.