Beyond the Capitals: Translocality/Transnationality in Europe and the South

Abstract

This chapter goes one step further than the previous one in showing the ways in which artists’ networks across Europe and the ‘South’ are often inscribed in multiple locations beyond the highly visible concentration of diasporic musicians in capital cities such as Paris or London (see Chapter 3). Here, then, we explore two issues: firstly, the phenomenon of multi-sited individuals and groups who are simultaneously located in a capital and provincial towns and cities across Europe or countries of origin, and secondly, the resettlement of diasporic artists and cultural producers in their countries of origin. Both of these trends are interrelated in that they both highlight the spatial complexity of diasporic and transnational ties. Migrant and post-migrant musicians are not only located in ‘minority ethnic neighbourhoods’ of Europe’s capital cities but rather live and are part of networks which straddle two or more locales. So the fractal metaphor used by Arjun Appadurai (1996) in his reflections on cultural globalization as ‘cultural chaos’ resonate with the trajectories of these multi-sited artists who are part of a fairly complicated network of cultural flows and translocal or transnational ties.