Abstract
Due to the lack of social systems supporting the cultural productions of migrant societies in Turkey, the venues and opportunities to which migrant musicians have access for the maintenance of their musical practices are limited. Under the given circumstances, especially in the first years after their arrival, street musicianship emerged as a new musical practice for Syrian musicians in Istanbul, and Beyoğlu District, the city’s cultural and political center, has become the venue for street musicians’ performances. Despite undergoing a rapid neoliberal transformation, Beyoğlu district, with Taksim Square and Istiklal Avenue, is a venue of interaction among locals, tourists, and various migrant groups from diverse social classes and identities. As such, it still possesses the potential to be the public sphere which can operate as the space of “a democratic ideal.” For migrant musicians, the street music practices, which fill the very heart of city with their voices and sounds, are means of claiming their existence in the city as potential actors of this public sphere. However, conducting the interaction with the other public space actors and the state officials through street music is not an easy task for Syrian musicians, and it requires the use of tactics from them. In this article, I summarize the given circumstances of Syrian street music performances and discuss the Beyoğlu district in the frame of being—or not being—a public space. I propose street music practice as political action, a “social non-movement”, as Asef Bayat calls it, and situate migrant musicians as political actors who are possible allies of other subaltern groups in Turkey.
Highlights
It was on a sultry afternoon in summer 2016 when we met with Osama and Mahdy in Taksim Square
In Sennett’s description, the public space in which the Syrian musicians appeared can be described as the very example of dead publicity, in which people were distanced from discussing their democratic demands
By performing in Taksim Square, the center of the city, Syrian musicians resist the various obstacles that disallow them from attending the music market in Turkey and overcome those obstacles by applying a brand-new musical practice for themselves: street musicianship
Summary
It was on a sultry afternoon in summer 2016 when we met with Osama and Mahdy in Taksim Square. Human Rights organizations reported illegal deportations in July and October 20194 and in February 2020 as a “response” to the attacks against Turkish troops in Syria; the Turkish government declared that Tukey would no longer stop the Syrian migrant flow to Europe.5 These cases show that, depending on the Turkish government’s Syrian policy and the European Union’s border regime, temporality and permanency are still obscure concepts in Turkey’s Syrian migratory experience, and the only steady fact in the dense history of Syrian migration is instability. I discuss their appearance in the public space referring to Richard Sennett’s ([1977] 2002) analogy between the street and the stage By reading his analogy in a broader framework, I imagine Syrian musicians as actors who participate in the conversation on this stage, not by talking (through language) but by singing (through music); when considering their lack of language skills in the first years of migration, the stage analogy becomes even more accurate. Even though some musicians revisited the street, street music has not returned to its heyday
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