Dance Hall Migrations is a research network that brings together scholars working on migratory dynamics surrounding dancing, dance-musics, dancehalls, cabarets, and global entertainment businesses throughout the twentieth century to the present. Above all, this project considers the layered meanings of human migration within and beyond the power relations conditioned by political circumstance, opening up academic conversations about the ways in which pleasures, loss, aspirations, money, disappointments, and imaginations have propelled people to migrate musically. In so doing, it seeks to re-think the ways in which dancehall migrations have impacted wider migration dynamics, as well as produced vibrant musical exchanges and practices that have contributed to global dance-music cultures. Deriving from the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant awarded to Yuiko Asaba, the dancehall migrations network fosters academic dialogues across institutions, disciplines and sub-disciplines. 

The dancehall migrations network also explores the broader methodological and disciplinary questions surrounding personal narratives and memory as history. Through interrogating the role of autobiographic stories and personal anecdotes in historical writings, the network opens up critical reconsideration of the conceptions of history relevant to the dancehall migrations. See Personal Narratives~History for more details. 

The research network’s first workshop, titled Modern Japanese Popular Music and the ‘Continents’: The Dream and Actuality was held at Osaka University on 28 February 2020. Watch this space for upcoming events!

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 846143.

Header image: Tango Suiyokai (タンゴすいよう会), Tokyo, 1964. Photo courtesy of Toshio Monna, the leader of Tango Ensemble Astrorico, Japan.

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