The Presence of Absence

Abstract This chapter is about migrants and the transmission of both home and foreign-ness through music. It continues the idea of allure in that its theme is longing for home, using examples from African-American, Portuguese, Irish-Gaelic, Mexican, Arabic, Balkan, and other languages and music cultures. For migrants in the United States drawn both to somewhere else and to the States, home itself is an elusive concept. An alluring combination of nostalgia, joy, longing, and loss—for which no precise word exists in English—is facilitated through the performance of music and the consumption of food and drink. The chapter concludes with the concept of aloha, and how it facilitates outsider ideas of home on the islands of Hawai‘i.