Arts and the Minority Politics: A Global Perspective

This paper claims that it is interesting and important to examine the social and political relevance of “popular art” in general, music in particular, in the context multinational, multicultural, multiracial and post-migration countries and cities. It is useful to examine how popular arts in general and music in particular can under certain spatial-temporal conditions allow minorities and second-generation immigrants to express political positions and mobilize politically. I The paper consists of four parts. The first part presents the general framework of the research from which this paper is drawn. The second part of the paper offers some conceptual precisions about what we mean by music in the present research. The third part of the paper proposes a theoretical framework to account for the relevance of musicians and musical expression and socio-political mobilization of immigrant and ethnicized minorities under the form of a typology of forms of minority political action through music. The fourth part applies this theoretical framework to the empirical data (current and historical) collected in different settings in Europe, African and Australia