Overview

An empathetic and eye-opening portrait of Muslim migrants in England that debunks many misperceptions about their music and poetry. In Journeys of Love, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson rejects the British media's and government's harmful portrayals of Pakistanis as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, stereotypes that have often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these Pakistani Muslim migrants—particularly those from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir—occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphors, that are central to surviving migration and its attendant losses. Hodgson shows how Mirpuris in England, as well as those who remain in Pakistan, carry on traditions of reciting a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century Sufi saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, translated by Hodgson here as Journeys of Love. With its themes of remaining true to one's home, the oppressed being saved, having patience, and keeping faith in God, this work has become the story of movement and displacement in its narrative arc, as well as through the way it provides spiritual and ethical frameworks for settling in new lands. It is this musical life, hidden from public view, that Hodgson describes as the poetics of migration. These poetics reveal the connections between Kashmir's rural village life and urban centers abroad, offering a sensitive and illuminating portrait of Muslim migration and multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.

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9780226841427

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Reviews

""From Mian Muhammad Bakhsh to Zaffar Kunial via rap in Bradford, Hodgson transforms the hardship of Kashmiri migration into a poetic journey, where the spiritual and the everyday intertwine. In this fascinating and original work, Hodgson complicates the experience of a home away from home and vividly explores how poetic verses strengthen the bonds among male migrants, transporting them across space, time, and the duress of borders. To understand migration as being poetic opens up new possibilities and new journeys to theorize on migration, longing, and belonging.” -- Alessandra Ciucci, Columbia University ""In this beautifully written ethnography, Hodgson leads us lovingly through lost and liminal places still standing whole in memory—a drowned homeland, a demolished photography studio, a Sufi shrine that appears annually from the waters of a dam, the multicultural Bradford streets of his own childhood. Journeys of Love is about the everyday worlds of the hard labor and ordinary striving of multiple marginalized working-class men in the unsung parts of post-industrial England and rural Pakistan. This is an intimate musical ethnography of migration over time and space like no other—it is a magnificent achievement.” -- Katherine Schofield, King’s College London ""This gem of a book demands our prolonged engagement. Hodgson offers us a profound tapestry of sounds, histories, and tales—an ethnography that is as fine-grained and as it is theoretically sophisticated. Situated in and between Pakistan and England, crisscrossing weddings and schools, rap workshops and festivals, Journeys of Love is a must-read for those interested in two of the defining issues of our age—migration and multiculturalism. The book stands out for its readability and empathy, that rare text that will appeal to general readers and find a place on graduate and undergraduate syllabi alike."" -- Jim Sykes, author of 'The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka'

Author Information

Thomas Hodgson is assistant professor in the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, where he teaches and researches music and Islam, South Asia, and music and technology.  

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