ABSTRACT
London’s Algerian diaspora community has grown significantly over the past two decades as individuals and families have moved from North Africa and France to the UK to study and work. This chapter suggests that the musical practices of Algerians in London are closely entwined with the city in which they live and that through musicking Algerian performers and audiences construct a shared notion of ‘Algerian-London’. It focuses on the works of two scholars to provide a framework for this chapter. Firstly, the author is influenced by Ruth Finnegan’s notion of urban ‘pathways’, which she explicates in her classic ethnographic study of music-making in Milton Keynes in the UK. Secondly, his thinking is shaped by Ayona Datta’s notion of a ‘geographical turn’ within diaspora and transnationalism studies, from which she claims that ‘the movement of goods, ideas, people, and capital across nation-states allows us to explore more situated politics of power that shape migrants’ relations to other spaces and scales’.
