Composing Aid: Music, Refugees, And Humanitarian Politics (Activist Encounters In Folklore And Ethnomusicology)

Music and the arts have become increasingly prominent facets of humanitarian interventions. A common belief undergirding these initiatives is that the power of creative expression can help and heal forced migrants. In Composing Aid, Oliver Shao complicates this idea through a critical study of music, dance, and performance in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, one of the largest and longest running encampments on the globe. This politically engaged ethnography examines a range of cultural practices—hip hop shows, pastoralist dances, Christian marches, and peace songs—within a sprawling urbanized site beset with precarity and inequality. Shao elucidates the significance of expressive culture in determining how camp inhabitants are expected to belong, as well as how they desire to belong, within a space of state- and humanitarian-induced migratory control. Offering a provocative rethinking of conventional ethnomusicology methods through its focus on activist research, Composing Aid provides keen insights for better understanding the social life of a long-term refugee camp, for conducting musical aid projects, and for reimagining state and humanitarian approaches to forced migration.

• | Author: Oliver Y. Shao
• | Publisher: Indiana University Press
• | Publication Date: Aug 15, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 216 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0253067650
• | ISBN-13: 9780253067654