Introduction : Réflexions sur la construction des identités dans des régions frontalières

Le 1er mai 2004, 59 ans après la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale, 10 nouveaux pays (dont 8 issus de l’ancien bloc soviétique ou de l’ancienne Yougoslavie) sont entrés dans l’Union européenne. Ainsi, d’une fédération d’états occidentaux, l’Union européenne s’est transformée en une « nouvelle Europe ». Avec l’entrée dans l’Union, l’une des frontières les plus disputées entre l’Est et l’Ouest est devenue une frontière interne entre partenaires. Le fer est devenu de la soie. Quinze ans auparava..

Globalised culture flows, transnational fields and transcultural capital

The chapter discusses globalised culture flows from a bottom-up, empirically grounded perspective of musicians moving and mixing in transnational fields. This privileges the mobilities of artists whilst not neglecting artistic form, creations and productions. The first section shows the ways in which migration of people and musical forms has given rise to many new musical creations. The second foregrounds musicians as a sub-section of people on the move, arguing the case for transnationalism as the most appropriate theoretical frame The chapter also underlines the need for combining research of internal migration within a country with research on international, cyclical and return migration between localised places and countries. It highlights the advantages of a transnational perspective on individual artists’ movements, arguing that movements and encounters of individual artists put into focus both the inequalities and barriers erected against migrants, as well as the possibility of a strategic activation of their transcultural capital

Language learning in the age of satellite television

165 tr. ; 24 c

Migrating borders: an introduction to European identity construction in process

This introduction to the edition provides the historical, geopolitical and methodological context for a programme of collaborative research conducted between 2000 and 2003 in sets of communities on the border between the EU and its south-)eastern ascendant nations. Our analysis is framed by interlinking comparative themes which form the cores of the different articles contained in this special issue. This opening article argues that the geopolitical dimension of the border needs to be understood both as an axis of past conflict and painful memories, and as an axis of contemporary socio-economic inequality. Only by understanding this double legacy and its effects on the communities along the border can ongoing conflicts between the people on either side of the border be fully understood

Music and migration: a transnational approach

This special issue on the theme of Music and Migration addresses the highly topical theme of migration and the vitality of “cultural diasporas” through the prism of migrating musicians and migrating musical forms. All nine original articles, including our own, engage with broader questions of how new modes of mobility and sociality are borne out of the social, cultural, historical and political interfaces between migration and music. Through a transnational, comparative and multi-level approach to the relationship between migration, movement and music, this special issue focuses on the aesthetic intersections between the local and the global, and between agency and identity. By taking music as its specific focus, the issue seeks to contribute to ongoing theoretical and methodological debates within migration and diaspora studies, including those related to transnational networks, globalization and cultural flows

Storying East-German pasts: memory discourses and narratives of readjustment on the German/Polish and former German/German border

This book aims to appraise sociolinguistic work devoted to the form and function of storytelling and to examine in detail the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental discursive resource across a range of contexts. The chapters presented here bring together some of the most recent work in the theory and practice of narrative analysis from a broad sociolinguistic perspective. They address some of the questions left implicit whenever stories are brought within the analytic frame of sociolinguistics: What exactly do we mean by 'story'?; what kind of social and contextual variations can determine the production and shape of situated stories, and what are the core elements of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource?; how is the relationship between narrative discourse and social context articulated in the construction of cultural identities? The data come both from institutional settings such as workplaces, courtrooms, schools, and the media, as well as from informal everyday settings

Re-configuring East-West identities: cross-generational discourses in German and Polish border communities

This article takes its data from one of two sets of communities studied as part of a British ESRC project into discursive constructions of identity. In this paper we argue three interrelated points. Firstly, we show the ways in which different elicitation formats of interviewee responses foreground variable aspects in people's identification. Secondly, we show how similar elicitation methods produced different criss-crossings of identification which render summary generalisations about identities in these communities problematic. Thirdly, we highlight the fluid and often paradoxical nature of multiple identifications across the different layers with which people choose to engage