Wiebke Sievers’ edited volume on cultural change and post-migrant societies focuses on migrants as active agents of cultural change. It rejects assimilationist and integrationist paradigms of the migration-culture nexus and aims to establish a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary perspective of analysis. It focuses on the broader socio-economic context in which the change occurs. The book’s focus is on migrants enacting within structures that emerged from nation-building, and on how people socialized in these structures are confronted with migrants, through a cultural change lens.
The book has three parts. The book’s first part (Chapters 2-5) opens with an understanding of the process of cultural change. In Chapter Two, Sievers focuses on Bourdieu’s literary field theory and its applicability in understanding societal change generated by migrants. Bourdieu does not consider migrants as enablers of this change. To bridge the gap, Sievers suggests adopting a post-migrant perspective and observing how racist debates exclude migrants from the visible public space, as well as the kind of struggle required to consider migration as a literary topic. In Chapter Three, Michael Parzer and Ana Mijic investigate migrants’ musical activities and how they interact with ethnic boundaries by applying Wimmer’s boundary-making approach. The authors identify three main mechanisms of music’s interaction with ethnic boundaries: Boundary changing (transforming characteristics and meaning), boundary shifting (altering the boundary’s topography), and boundary crossing (switching sides without affecting the boundary). In Chapter four, Rikke Gram, Lars Baedeker, and Antonie Schmiz focus on structural change of institutions that offer culture, to be more precise, how researchers should produce knowledge on these institutions in societies that face migration by concentrating on two German cities (Osnabrück and Dresden). This cross-comparative study highlights the role of cultural institutions’ position towards migration and how this relates to the researcher’s observation of structural change. In the former case, the institution is open to migration and has a relationship with the researcher’s original institution, allowing the researcher to gain insights into structural change. In the latter case, the institution is not open to migration and is situated in a largely racist city, with no relationship to the researcher’s original institution, limiting the researcher's access to its structures. In Chapter Five, Joanna Jurckiewicz and Jens Schneider argue that German cultural institutions did not adapt to the fact that Germany is an immigration society by focusing on two festivals in Sindelfingen and a theater in the metropolitan city of Hamburg. In all three cases, the authors identify that cultural institutions perceive migration as something external to the German identity, confusing internationalism with interculturalism.
