The Politics of Music(ology) in the Maghrib
Episode 172
The Politics of Music(ology) in the Maghrib
In this episode, historian Liz Matsushita discusses the ideas, institutions, and technologies that informed the study and categorization of different North African music genres during the colonial and independence periods. What would have been considered music? Who was interested in studying North African musical genres and why? Matsushita describes how concepts of modernity, authenticity, and race shaped musicology and musical practice across Maghrebi societies and considers the extent to which these concepts still hold sway today.
Liz Matsushita is a historian of modern North Africa and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She previously taught at Claremont McKenna College and earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. Her research examines the history of music and musicology in colonial and post-colonial Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the ways in which music served as a political idiom that shaped French and Maghrebi understandings of race and power.
This episode was recorded via Zoom on the 10th of May, 2023 by the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT)
We thank our friend Ignacio Villalón, AIMS contemporary art follow for his guitar performance for the introduction and conclusion of this podcast.
Suggested Bibliography
Agawu, Kofi. (2003). Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge.
Aidi, Hisham. “Decolonizing Gnawa Music.” In Souffles Monde 1 (April 2023): http://www.soufflesmonde.com.
Aydoun, Ahmed. (2014). Musiques du Maroc. Casablanca: A. Retnani Editions.
Becker, Cynthia J. (2020). Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Calderwood, Eric. (2018). Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Davis, Ruth. “Arab-Andalusian Music in Tunisia.” In Early Music 24:3 (August 1996): 423-435.
Gérard, Brice. (2014). Histoire de l’ethnomusicologie en France (1929-1961). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Goodman, Jane E. (2005). Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kapchan, Deborah. (2007). Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Racy, A.J. “Historical Worldviews of Early Ethnomusicologists: An East-West Encounter in Cairo, 1932.” In Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. Stephen Blum, Philip Bohlman, and Daniel Neuman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991: 68-91.
Glasser, Jonathan. (2016 ). The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silver, Christopher. “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy Elmaghribi.” In International Journal of Middle East Studies 52:1 (February 2020): 23-47.
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