At the cultural level, the aim is to examine how migrants and ethnic minorities’ musical productions inspired by their experience of migration and/or discrimination change and enrich local cultures. At the social level, the paper explores how popular music can become a means of communication and dialogue between different groups to build some form of shared local citizenship. At the political level, the relations between popular music, collective identities and the forms of the social and political mobilisation in multicultural cities need more careful investigation (Martiniello and Lafleur, 2008; Mattern, 1998). First, we need to better understand how musical expressions play a role in the negotiation and the assertion of various conceptions of the local (ethnic, transethnic, etc.) identity. Second, how do musical expressions serve the protest against and denunciation of the local social and political order but also the expression of a support for the established local order and for its mystified values?
This paper addresses these issues in a trans-local perspective by studying neighbourhoods in European cities.
