Paper short abstract:

This article discusses displacement and belonging by analysing the relationship between consumption and production of music, and the (re)making of individual and collective identities in a community of Malian Kel Tamasheq, also known as Tuareg, refugees in Burkina Faso.

Paper long abstract:

This article discusses displacement and belonging by analysing the relationship between consumption and production of music, and the (re)making of individual and collective identities in a community of Malian Kel Tamasheq, also known as Tuareg, refugees in Burkina Faso. The argument here challenges mainstream perspectives depicting displacement as a mere loss that essentially and definitively de-roots a community: a displaced subjectivity is a-politicied and a-historicised because the only factor defining his/her individual's position is being a refugee. On the contrary, this paper argues that "being displaced" is not only represented by the status of refugee, but it involves transformative productive processes. "Being displaced" has a double-effect on how individual and collective subjectivities express themselves in relation to their feeling of belonging. On the one hand, forced separation from home fosters stronger feelings of attachment to activities perceived as essentially representing the population's traditions; on the other hand, novel contingencies make these cultural factors sometimes redundant or challenged by other practices and expressions of values. While taking care not to belittle the physical and psychological deprivations that forced migration entails, this article underlines the importance of transformative or reactionary processes of cultural making within a context of displacement.