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Chapter 2 Music, Mobility, and Borderscapes in the Fiction of Jamal Mahjoub

This chapter will examine the ways in which the fiction of the contemporary black British/European writer Jamal Mahjoub uses borderscapes and music to address issues of belonging to place, community, culture, and nation in the context of border-crossing mobility. While critics such as Christin Hoene have addressed the role of music in postcolonial narratives as playing a central role in the formation of identity,1 this chapter shows how Mahjoub’s fiction uses music as a part of cultural mobility. As I will show, the three novels under study contextualize music in diverse borderscapes where the relationship between the host and the migrant community, tradition and its postcolonial appropriation, is redefined. Recently several theorists have sought to develop the concept of borderscape and argued that the term refers to spaces of social and cultural interaction where intercultural processes take place, generating diverse encounters and transforming the identities of those entering the borderscape. I will argue that the borderscapes of Mahjoub’s novels are not only sites of interaction, relational and moving spaces, as Chiara Brambilla understands the characteristics of the concept,2 but that they are at the same time transforming and transformative, hybrid and fluid, rather than stable and static. In the case of Mahjoub’s novels, such spaces are appropriated through fiction and organized through references to different forms of music. In this chapter I will analyse diverse representations of music in Mahjoub’s novels to suggest that they contribute to the making of borderscapes where new identities come into existence. In so doing they negotiate the formation of migrant identities amidst hegemonic ideologies, as