Coping and confinement on the border: the affective politics of music workshops in British immigration detention

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the drive to securitise migration, immigration detention has expanded rapidly across western democratic states. This article investigates the function and meaning that music workshops have for foreign nationals held in UK detention centres. Drawing on scholarship on affect and emotion, I consider how the workshops produce separate affective forms of time and space that stand apart from, but also shape the dominant structures and social discourses of the detention centre. For many participants, caught in a state of perpetual dislocation and the hierarchies of detention centre orderings, the workshops are a space to escape or make sense of place, investing space with an affectivity that provides a meaningfully felt counterpoint to the austerity of the detention every day. Nevertheless, as much as music is a resisting practice and a means of reinventing detention, it also functions as a technology of social control, perpetuating hegemonic orderings. Thus, a closer look at the performance space draws attention to the ways in which music merges with other biopolitical technologies in structuring and defining life in detention.