Article:

Songs of home (and away): Ethnically-coded diegetic music and multidirectional nostalgia in fiction films about Polish migrants

This article offers a textual and contextual analysis of ethnically-coded musical performances in migration-themed fiction film, with a particular focus on productions featuring expatriate characters from Poland. As we argue, the Polish sample substantially differs from soundtrack-related approaches prevalent in films about postcolonial migrants and ethnics. In the hands of the filmmakers and actors involved, traditional Polish songs that typically revolve around protective domesticity and bonding (especially lullabies) hint at the possibility of reinstalling a sense of intergenerational affinity at the core of the local household. Therefore, rather than evoking an aura of multicultural hybridity or exotic Otherness, the foreign-language musical performances featured in the films involved create a soundscape in which nostalgia ceases to be the exclusive property of the displaced newcomer.