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Books by Shayna Silverstein
Wesleyan University Press, 2024
Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war ... more Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna M. Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. The book situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria's recent (and ongoing) turmoil. Silverstein shows how people imagine the Syrian nation through dabke, how the state has coopted it, how performances of masculinity reveal—and play with—the tensions and complexities of the broader social imaginary, how forces opposed to the state have used it resistively, and how migrants and refugees have reimagined it in their new homes in Europe and the United States. She offers deeply thoughtful reflections on the ethnographer's ethical and political dilemmas on fieldwork in an authoritarian state. Silverstein's study ultimately questions the limits of authoritarian power, considering the pleasure and play intrinsic to dabke circles as evidence for how performance cultures sustain social life and solidify group bonds while reproducing the societal divides endemic to Syrian authoritarianism.
Papers by Shayna Silverstein
Deleted Journal, Jun 3, 2019
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, d... more During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, displaced Syrians fleeing war to seek asylum and a livable life were simultaneously welcomed as vulnerable strangers who could contribute to European economies and societies and perceived as threats to the imaginaries of a homogenous Europe. This essay critiques the logic embedded in this narrative, namely that migrants are a social factor external and destabilizing to Europe, through a critical interpretation of Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair’s work, Displacement (2016). This provocative dance work pivots on Alzghair’s reimagining of dabke, Syria’s celebrated folk dance, in which he deconstructs the social relations and embodied aesthetics of popular dabke practices to forge a political critique of Syrian authoritarianism and forced migration. By crafting a repertoire of movement that critiques the aesthetic and political ideologies on which it is based, Displacement arguably disr...
ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes how dance, gender, and state power function together as a significan... more ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes how dance, gender, and state power function together as a significant node of critique in recent cultural production that addresses authoritarianism in Syria. Identifying the symbolic trope of dabke, a popular dance ubiquitous in Syrian life, selected films, literature, and choreography, this essay argues that the discussed works dislodge dabke from its feminized association with authenticity, folk culture, and nationhood to instead represent dabke as a form of hegemonic masculinity that perpetuates sovereignty, patriarchy, and autocracy. Through the rendering of embodied acts of dabke performance, hegemonic and resilient modes of masculinity are equated with spectacles of violence attached to the state, repressive tactics by the police state, and performative complicity with the regime. This essay argues that sovereign and autocratic forms of power are not universal abstractions but are embedded in the gendered structures of the society in which such po...
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023
During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, d... more During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, displaced Syrians fleeing war to seek asylum and a livable life were simultaneously welcomed as vulnerable strangers who could contribute to European economies and societies and perceived as threats to the imaginaries of a homogenous Europe. This essay critiques the logic embedded in this narrative, namely that migrants are a social factor external and destabilizing to Europe, through a critical interpretation of Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair’s work, Displacement (2016). This provocative dance work pivots on Alzghair’s reimagining of dabke, Syria’s celebrated folk dance, in which he deconstructs the social relations and embodied aesthetics of popular dabke practices to forge a political critique of Syrian authoritarianism and forced migration. By crafting a repertoire of movement that critiques the aesthetic and political ideologies on which it is based, Displacement arguably disrupts the postcolonial imaginaries of national identity and place that have historically ensconced folk dance in Syria and in Europe, respectively, and transforms the possibilities of what cultural heritage connotes, represents and signifies for Syrians and Europeans. Instead, the destabilizing work of embodied performance reveals how instability is endemic to European spaces and society. Through the convergence of performance theory and praxis, this essay demonstrates how Displacement stages live, perpetual, repetitive, and embodied motion in ways that open a space for artists and audiences to collectively engage with a fractious period and reconfigure the complex relations of power and representation situated between Syria and Europe.
This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by ex... more This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate ho...
Remapping Sound Studies, 2019
Given the salient role of embodied tactics in contemporary networked protests in performance, in ... more Given the salient role of embodied tactics in contemporary networked protests in performance, in this essay I listen for how the embodied sonic praxis of protests during the Arab revolutions translates into the audio, visual, and text modalities of digital media. I propose audibility, or the appearance and perceptibility of sound objects, as that which translates the “live” sound that occurs in physical spaces into representational spaces, and, in so doing, alters the temporality and spatiality of the sonic experience. Interrogating who and what are rendered audible as part of the political contestations that drive protest actions, I demonstrate how audibility is a technological condition, sensory force, and social process through which affective publics emerge in networked spaces. I begin with social media posts from the first months of non-violent protest actions in 2011, in Egypt and Syria, analyzing the translation of sonic objects into written texts that narrativize the subject...
Performance Matters, 2021
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
Performance Matters, 2021
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2019
Since the peak of the European refugee crisis in 2015, public debates on borders, bodies, and rig... more Since the peak of the European refugee crisis in 2015, public debates on borders, bodies, and rights have raised charged questions about whether and how to "let in" migrants seeking asylum. From fences constructed along the Austrian-Hungarian border to providing some measure of humanitarian relief for boat crises in the Mediterranean, land and water have become contested sites for expulsion. The question of who belongs – who may enter, who may be deported, and who may remain – in continental Europe is entangled with what Fatima El Tayeb articulates as “the desire to create unambiguous European spaces” (2011: 4). Here, I consider how expulsionary discourses and practices affect the lived experience of migrants, specifically displaced Syrians, approximately five million of whom have fled their country of origin after seven years of war. Their experiences of precarity and displacement epitomize the concept of “livability,” or the ability to sustain a livable life under conditions of precarity that Judith Butler, in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (2009), argues is endemic to contemporary political life.
My audiography considers how Syrian migrants “get orientated” (Ahmed 2006) to the spatial and sensory dimensions of precarity by attuning to the auditory dynamics of displacement. As Sara Ahmed argues in Queer Phenomenology, “the world acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn… Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our attention towards” (2006: 1). Auditory experiences are crucial to how we move through space, particularly when navigating unfamiliar worlds. This work aims to make audible the sono-spatial experiences of Syrian migrants as they “orientate” themselves in conditions of displacement. I juxtapose field recordings and musical samples to suggest how people "inhabit" and "apprehend" spaces of encounter during their journeys, in other words, how they navigate spaces in which they are paradoxically “out-of-place” and hypervisible.
Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies, 2016
Islam and Popular Culture
Music and Politics
Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Maria Sonevytsk... more Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Maria Sonevytsky, Shayna Silverstein, Benjamin Harbert, and Noriko Manabe. I contributed the paper, "The Sounds of Post-Inauguration Protests: Memory, Circulation, Innovation."
Islam and Popular Culture, Apr 2016
Music & Politics, 2019
This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in or... more This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in order to better understand the practices, subjects, and spaces implicated in protest. Focusing on how listening subjects move through and constitute protest spaces, it draws on participant ethnography at the 2017 Women’s March to demonstrate that listening subjects are historically contingent in ways that amplify how protests happen under distinct political constraints. It situates the Women’s March in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the revolution in Syria to suggest through comparison how political subjects are not universal but constructed in relation to the powers that they protest. The essay argues that the effects of listening, chanting, and marching on the distribution of power at protest events can be evidenced through the concealment or exercise of dissent as listening subjects move through and constitute political spaces.
Wesleyan University Press, 2024
Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war ... more Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna M. Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. The book situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria's recent (and ongoing) turmoil. Silverstein shows how people imagine the Syrian nation through dabke, how the state has coopted it, how performances of masculinity reveal—and play with—the tensions and complexities of the broader social imaginary, how forces opposed to the state have used it resistively, and how migrants and refugees have reimagined it in their new homes in Europe and the United States. She offers deeply thoughtful reflections on the ethnographer's ethical and political dilemmas on fieldwork in an authoritarian state. Silverstein's study ultimately questions the limits of authoritarian power, considering the pleasure and play intrinsic to dabke circles as evidence for how performance cultures sustain social life and solidify group bonds while reproducing the societal divides endemic to Syrian authoritarianism.
Deleted Journal, Jun 3, 2019
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, d... more During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, displaced Syrians fleeing war to seek asylum and a livable life were simultaneously welcomed as vulnerable strangers who could contribute to European economies and societies and perceived as threats to the imaginaries of a homogenous Europe. This essay critiques the logic embedded in this narrative, namely that migrants are a social factor external and destabilizing to Europe, through a critical interpretation of Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair’s work, Displacement (2016). This provocative dance work pivots on Alzghair’s reimagining of dabke, Syria’s celebrated folk dance, in which he deconstructs the social relations and embodied aesthetics of popular dabke practices to forge a political critique of Syrian authoritarianism and forced migration. By crafting a repertoire of movement that critiques the aesthetic and political ideologies on which it is based, Displacement arguably disr...
ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes how dance, gender, and state power function together as a significan... more ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes how dance, gender, and state power function together as a significant node of critique in recent cultural production that addresses authoritarianism in Syria. Identifying the symbolic trope of dabke, a popular dance ubiquitous in Syrian life, selected films, literature, and choreography, this essay argues that the discussed works dislodge dabke from its feminized association with authenticity, folk culture, and nationhood to instead represent dabke as a form of hegemonic masculinity that perpetuates sovereignty, patriarchy, and autocracy. Through the rendering of embodied acts of dabke performance, hegemonic and resilient modes of masculinity are equated with spectacles of violence attached to the state, repressive tactics by the police state, and performative complicity with the regime. This essay argues that sovereign and autocratic forms of power are not universal abstractions but are embedded in the gendered structures of the society in which such po...
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023
During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, d... more During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, displaced Syrians fleeing war to seek asylum and a livable life were simultaneously welcomed as vulnerable strangers who could contribute to European economies and societies and perceived as threats to the imaginaries of a homogenous Europe. This essay critiques the logic embedded in this narrative, namely that migrants are a social factor external and destabilizing to Europe, through a critical interpretation of Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair’s work, Displacement (2016). This provocative dance work pivots on Alzghair’s reimagining of dabke, Syria’s celebrated folk dance, in which he deconstructs the social relations and embodied aesthetics of popular dabke practices to forge a political critique of Syrian authoritarianism and forced migration. By crafting a repertoire of movement that critiques the aesthetic and political ideologies on which it is based, Displacement arguably disrupts the postcolonial imaginaries of national identity and place that have historically ensconced folk dance in Syria and in Europe, respectively, and transforms the possibilities of what cultural heritage connotes, represents and signifies for Syrians and Europeans. Instead, the destabilizing work of embodied performance reveals how instability is endemic to European spaces and society. Through the convergence of performance theory and praxis, this essay demonstrates how Displacement stages live, perpetual, repetitive, and embodied motion in ways that open a space for artists and audiences to collectively engage with a fractious period and reconfigure the complex relations of power and representation situated between Syria and Europe.
This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by ex... more This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate ho...
Remapping Sound Studies, 2019
Given the salient role of embodied tactics in contemporary networked protests in performance, in ... more Given the salient role of embodied tactics in contemporary networked protests in performance, in this essay I listen for how the embodied sonic praxis of protests during the Arab revolutions translates into the audio, visual, and text modalities of digital media. I propose audibility, or the appearance and perceptibility of sound objects, as that which translates the “live” sound that occurs in physical spaces into representational spaces, and, in so doing, alters the temporality and spatiality of the sonic experience. Interrogating who and what are rendered audible as part of the political contestations that drive protest actions, I demonstrate how audibility is a technological condition, sensory force, and social process through which affective publics emerge in networked spaces. I begin with social media posts from the first months of non-violent protest actions in 2011, in Egypt and Syria, analyzing the translation of sonic objects into written texts that narrativize the subject...
Performance Matters, 2021
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
Performance Matters, 2021
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2019
Since the peak of the European refugee crisis in 2015, public debates on borders, bodies, and rig... more Since the peak of the European refugee crisis in 2015, public debates on borders, bodies, and rights have raised charged questions about whether and how to "let in" migrants seeking asylum. From fences constructed along the Austrian-Hungarian border to providing some measure of humanitarian relief for boat crises in the Mediterranean, land and water have become contested sites for expulsion. The question of who belongs – who may enter, who may be deported, and who may remain – in continental Europe is entangled with what Fatima El Tayeb articulates as “the desire to create unambiguous European spaces” (2011: 4). Here, I consider how expulsionary discourses and practices affect the lived experience of migrants, specifically displaced Syrians, approximately five million of whom have fled their country of origin after seven years of war. Their experiences of precarity and displacement epitomize the concept of “livability,” or the ability to sustain a livable life under conditions of precarity that Judith Butler, in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (2009), argues is endemic to contemporary political life.
My audiography considers how Syrian migrants “get orientated” (Ahmed 2006) to the spatial and sensory dimensions of precarity by attuning to the auditory dynamics of displacement. As Sara Ahmed argues in Queer Phenomenology, “the world acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn… Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our attention towards” (2006: 1). Auditory experiences are crucial to how we move through space, particularly when navigating unfamiliar worlds. This work aims to make audible the sono-spatial experiences of Syrian migrants as they “orientate” themselves in conditions of displacement. I juxtapose field recordings and musical samples to suggest how people "inhabit" and "apprehend" spaces of encounter during their journeys, in other words, how they navigate spaces in which they are paradoxically “out-of-place” and hypervisible.
Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies, 2016
Islam and Popular Culture
Music and Politics
Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Maria Sonevytsk... more Panel on the Women's March, Society for Ethnomusicology, with Ben Tausig, Maria Sonevytsky, Shayna Silverstein, Benjamin Harbert, and Noriko Manabe. I contributed the paper, "The Sounds of Post-Inauguration Protests: Memory, Circulation, Innovation."
Islam and Popular Culture, Apr 2016
Music & Politics, 2019
This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in or... more This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in order to better understand the practices, subjects, and spaces implicated in protest. Focusing on how listening subjects move through and constitute protest spaces, it draws on participant ethnography at the 2017 Women’s March to demonstrate that listening subjects are historically contingent in ways that amplify how protests happen under distinct political constraints. It situates the Women’s March in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the revolution in Syria to suggest through comparison how political subjects are not universal but constructed in relation to the powers that they protest. The essay argues that the effects of listening, chanting, and marching on the distribution of power at protest events can be evidenced through the concealment or exercise of dissent as listening subjects move through and constitute political spaces.
Music and Politics
This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in or... more This essay considers how embodied tactics (re)distribute auditory power in political spaces in order to better understand the practices, subjects, and spaces implicated in protest. Focusing on how listening subjects move through and constitute protest spaces, it draws on participant ethnography at the 2017 Women's March to demonstrate that listening subjects are historically contingent in ways that amplify how protests happen under distinct political constraints. It situates the Women's March in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the revolution in Syria to suggest through comparison how political subjects are not universal but constructed in relation to the powers that they protest. The essay argues that the effects of listening, chanting, and marching on the distribution of power at protest events can be evidenced through the concealment or exercise of dissent as listening subjects move through and constitute political spaces. Around 10:30 a.m., a police SUV rounds the corner at C and 6th St SW, about a block away from the crowds gathered on Independence Avenue for the 2017 Women's March in Washington, DC. Its siren pings high and brittle. 1 My heart leaps for a quick moment and I spin my head around. Its vibrations sear through me, like I have just stuck my finger in an electric socket. I am on the verge of flight mode. But there does not appear to be an incident. I relax. Perhaps the siren is being used to tell us pussyhat protesters the direction in which we should be heading. However, as it is not immediately clear to me why the siren was used, I am a bit annoyed and unnerved by the surplus sound that has charged the crowded intersection. Even before the siren, I had been feeling nervous in such an exposed and overcrowded space. An hour or so later, I chat with a woman at the same corner. I notice her headwear. Unlike most of the march participants, for whom a handknit pink hat with tufts known as a pussyhat signified a political stance for women's rights and opposition to then-newly-inaugurated President Trump, she is wearing a union cap. An Afro-Latina veteran protester from Virginia, she feels somewhat disaffected by the rookie crowd surrounding her. We somehow get to talking about the police presence at the Women's March. Like me, she was not amused by the siren: "It works people up into a panic," she says. "There's no need to use it. They're just coming through. Instead of beep beep… asshole use of the siren [sic]." I nodded in agreement. I also felt resentful of being hailed by the siren, of becoming a listening subject who could be steered around by the police officer through the audible authority of this emergency signal. Whether the police officer's intended use for the siren was perceived as helpful or an overreach of authority, his siren hailed its listeners. In this sonic encounter, the siren's audible materiality signaled the authority of the police and constructed consensual subjects in a politically contentious space.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Jul 1, 2012
Syrian Studies Association Bulletin, 2010
Reviews Kligman, Mark. 2009. Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in... more Reviews Kligman, Mark. 2009. Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2015
In this compendium of Syrian television drama from the 1960s to today, Rebecca Joubin examines lo... more In this compendium of Syrian television drama from the 1960s to today, Rebecca Joubin examines love and marriage in the popular genre ofmusalsalat (television miniseries) as metaphors for state and society. Joubin approaches musalsalat as literary texts through whichwriters voice their critique of the regime and subvert its official narratives. Based on her research on over 250 dramas and extensive fieldwork in Sahnaya from 2002 to 2008, she illuminates the centrality of gender to these literary texts and argues that the power dynamics of love, sexuality, and marriage provide an “outlet for the expression of oppositional consciousness” (12). Joubin is primarily interested in the allegorical relationship between patriarchal family structures that subjugate women and an authoritarian state that oppresses its subjects. She traces this relationship through numerous plot synopses of musalsalat that she groups into successive historical periods of television drama. Recurring in these works is the qabaday, a “tough man” figure of masculinity who deals with political alienation, economic marginalization, and corruption both in the public domain and at home. By relating the qabaday to the shifting relations of Syrian femininity, female sexuality, and state politics, Joubin attests that television drama is a site for the construction of Syrian masculinity, nationhood, and political consciousness. Of the several studies of Syrianmusalsalat that were published in the past decade, Joubin’s study is the first to provide a historical survey of the genre. She begins with early political parodies of the 1960s that feature leading actors and the directors Duraid Lahham, Nihad Qalʾi, and Muhammad al-Maghut. These parodies depict women as secular, modern, and independent characters who eschew the head scarf, work outside the home, and retain power in the family. Joubin argues that their empowerment is less a statement for women’s emancipation or an embrace of egalitarianism andmore a literary device that emasculates male characters. Frustrated by their marriages, which are often likened to a
Twentieth-Century Music, 2017
Forms of black popular culture, writes Stuart Hall, are always ‘impure, to some degree hybridized... more Forms of black popular culture, writes Stuart Hall, are always ‘impure, to some degree hybridized from a vernacular base. Thus, they must always be heard, not simply as the recovery of a lost dialogue bearing clues for the production of new musics . . . but as what they are – adaptations, molded to the mixed, contradictory, hybrid spaces of popular culture’.1 Hearing in hybridity the social contradictions of popular culture, Michael Denning presents a cultural history of a recording boom in the urban dance musics of port cities in the late 1920s. In Noise Uprising, he recuperates recordings of kroncong, samba, hula, jazz, and chaabi, and other hybrid genres of popular music long dismissed by cultural elites as commercial, inauthentic, and exoticized. Instead of disregarding these musics, Denning challenges his readers to ‘decolonize the ear’, that is, to hear in these recordings the contradictory and hybrid relations that constitute the global flow of sound media, bodies, and capital. Central to his study is the historical conjuncture of the advent of electrical recording for phonographs with early twentieth-century colonial modes of production. In Chapter 2, Denning enters the cacophonous ‘edges and borders of the empires of global capitalism . . . the barrios, bidonvilles, barrack-yards, arrabales, and favelas of an archipelago of colonial ports’ (38). He introduces in succession each port’s urban dance music, detailing the sites, spaces, histories, and vernacular practices that shaped local musical life. These ports, he argues, map out an ‘archipelago’ that linked settler colonial states with colonies. The port cities were connected by not only the movement of embodied labour across this archipelago but also the global circulation of vernacular musics across three arcs, which Denning dubs ‘the black Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific’ (5). By inscribing ‘noises’ onto the grooves of phonographic records, Denning argues, electrical recording thrust creolized, peripheral, working-class subjects into the public sphere. His narrative arc focuses on how the circulation of vernacular musics of colonial port cities ‘created an entirely new relation between sound and space, music and territory’ (109). Denning details the effects of electrical recording on local musicking practices in order to demonstrate how mobility and media shaped the experience of peripheral colonial modernity. Yet the paradox of his political
twentieth-century music, 2017
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, 2019
TDR: The Drama Review, 2018
Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog
Political and Legal Anthropology, 2015
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2015
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2012
Ethnomusicology is the study of music --particularly that outside the Western classical tradition... more Ethnomusicology is the study of music --particularly that outside the Western classical tradition -in its social and cultural context. This course explores the art of improvisation in popular and classical music of the Arab world. We will approach these arts from three perspectives: performance and technique, listening and analysis, and ethnographic inquiry. We begin by contextualizing musical practices within secular, religious, and historical frameworks in the Middle East in order to develop an appreciation for artistic expression and style. In the second part, we focus primarily on modal practice in the Arab world and analyze recordings and performances in order to better understand the classical music genre known as tarab. We conclude the course by setting several concepts and models of improvisation in relation to issues of aesthetics, language, and power.
Office Hours: Thursdays, 1:30-3:30, Goodspeed 314 or by appointment
Office hours: Weds 10:30-12:30pm, Goodspeed 314 Office hours: by appointment
Performance Matters , 2020
The first of two linked special issues, Sound Acts, Part 1 explores the resonances of sound in th... more The first of two linked special issues, Sound Acts, Part 1 explores the resonances of sound in the field of performance studies, asking "how the materiality of sound acts as a form of aesthetic and political possibility."