Paper short abstract:

This paper considers complex emotional dynamics in the musical lives of asylum seekers and the significance of these resonances in their songs as they navigate the structural constraints of mobility and immobility together with profound emotional effects of dislocation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers complex emotional dynamics in the musical lives of asylum seekers and the significance of these resonances in their songs as they navigate the structural constraints of mobility and immobility, together with profound emotional effects of dislocation. I analyse musical journeys of emotion as modes of resistance and resilience to oppression and consider how trauma, grief and pain can become tools to humanize the 'empty spaces' of new worlds through a strategic reorientation of kinaesthetic and imaginative empathy. I analyse how recounting painful journeys immerses singers and listeners in visceral recognition of events that have the power to animate the 'empty space' of the singer's displacement. In turn, these movements simultaneously afford opportunities for 'a new human sociality' of open-ended dialogue and polyphony 'centred around, rather than built over against, the victim' (Alison 1998: 307). In this empathic process, I will analyse how singers express emotional transitions from narrative to the poetics of song and consider the ways in which journeying facilitates a transformation of recognition that both enlivens 'the Other' inviting moral action and reaction. Through empathic listening to the vulnerability of these musicians, their songs have become a powerful medium of validation that is both highly personal and intimately public. In turn, listeners become entailed in processes of interdependency with the capacity to empower further recognition of these musicians who are coping with fragile senses of liminality.