SEM 63 Annual Meeting

SEM 63rd Annual Meeting Society for Ethnomusicology 63rd Annual Meeting, 2018 Individual Presentation Abstracts SEM 2018 Abstracts Book – Note to Reader The SEM 2018 Abstracts Book is divided into two sections: 1) Individual Presentations, and 2) Organized Sessions. Individual Presentation abstracts are alphabetized by the presenter’s last name, while Organized Session abstracts are alphabetized by the session chair’s last name. Note that Organized Sessions are designated in the Program Book as “Panel,” “Roundtable,” or “Workshop.” Sessions designated as “Paper Session” do not have a session abstract. To determine the time and location of an Individual Presentation, consult the index of participants at the back of the Program Book. To determine the time and location of an Organized Session, see the session number (e.g., 1A) in the Abstracts Book and consult the program in the Program Book. Individual Presentation Abstracts Pages 1 – 76 Organized Session Abstracts Pages 77 – 90 Society for Ethnomusicology 63rd Annual Meeting, 2018 Individual Presentation Abstracts Ethiopian Reggae Artists Negotiating Proximity to Repatriated Rastafari American Dreams: Porgy and Bess, Roberto Leydi, and the Birth of Italian David Aarons, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Ethnomusicology Siel Agugliaro, University of Pennsylvania Although a growing number of Ethiopians have embraced reggae music since the late 1990s, many remain cautious about being too closely connected to the This paper puts in conversation two apparently irreconcilable worlds. The first is repatriated Rastafari community in Ethiopia whose members promote themselves that of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), a "folk opera" reminiscent of as reggae ambassadors. Since the 1960s, Rastafari from Jamaica and other black minstrelsy racial stereotypes, and indebted to the Romantic conception of countries have been migrating (‘repatriating’) to and settling in Ethiopia, believing Volk as it had been applied to the U.S. context by two generations of musicians and it to be their Promised Land. Ethiopians view this repatriated Rastafari scholars, from Antonin Dvořák and Frederick Henry Koch to John and Alan community with ambivalence due to the community’s use of marijuana and their Lomax. The second is that of Roberto Leydi, one of the scholars responsible for the veneration of Haile Selassie--a controversial figure in Ethiopian history (MacLeod foundation of Italian ethnomusicology after World War II. An admirer of Porgy and 2014). Reggae, a global music genre, retains an elective affinity (Daynes 2010) with Bess , Leydi developed in his youth a strong interest for American black music, the Rastafari movement and is therefore central to the repatriation process. In this which to his mind provided an example of those "folk roots" he was looking for as paper, building on Rommen’s discussion on non-Rastafari reggae artists who an alternative to the official culture promoted by fascism. In the late 1950s, Leydi negotiate their proximity to Rastafari (2007), I examine the effects of an emerging began collecting folk music materials from Italian rural areas, and organized Rastafari community in Ethiopia as a result of spiritual migration. I argue that special shows featuring the "authentic" interpreters of such traditions. Based on Ethiopians negotiate and renegotiate proximity to Rastafari resulting not only in archival material and scholarly literature (Radano and Bohlman 2000, Crawford competing localized ways of performing reggae but also of performing and relating 2006, Stoller 2009, André 2012, Ferraro 2015), this paper pursues a twofold goal. to Rastafari. Based on eleven months of ethnographic research in Ethiopia, I show On the one hand, I aim to problematize the history of Italian ethnomusicology by how Ethiopian reggae artists, who employ various musical signs, align their music placing it in a longer historical trajectory of racial representation. On the other, I to some Rastafari themes to exhibit authenticity while distancing themselves from argue that precisely this narrative, despite its burden of misunderstandings and particular Rastafari beliefs and practices. This paper highlights some ways in cultural appropriations, allowed Leydi and his collaborators to carve out for which immigrant groups can affect music practices of a host country by inspiring themselves a new identity in their own country, while giving national visibility to new trajectories that are constantly negotiated and renegotiated. previously neglected folk musical genres and practices. “Thingified Other,” Musical Pasts, and the Insider Curse! “O Iran, O Bejeweled Land”: “Ey Iran”, the Unofficial Anthem for Ama Aduonum, Illinois State University Iranians’ Unity and Patriotism Nasim Ahmadian, University of Alberta In this presentation, I take a critical look at my experience as an expatriate Ghanaian Akan female scholar investigating the musical pasts of an Akan Asafo The dark political climate of Iran in 1944 during the “Anglo-Soviet Invasion” warrior group, a mostly-male tradition, in Ghana. Ethnomusicologists have long prompted the scholar-poet Hossein Gol-e-Golab and the composer Ruhollah grappled with the dichotomies between insider/outsider status. Who is an outsider Khaleghi to express the ideals of patriotism through composing the anthem of "Ey or insider, and when and how one becomes the other gets confusing. What happens Iran" ("Oh Iran"). The composition was to become the most popular musical symbol when a "native" goes totally outfield and is then excluded from the inside? More of the Iranian nation. "Ey Iran" was never confirmed officially as the national importantly, do these labels even help inform field methods, knowledge, and the anthem by the state, either before or after the 1979 Iranian revolution, and in fact production of texts? During my search for musical pasts, my walks and encounters, was banned for years by the Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic regimes. Yet the both challenging and frustrating, provided opportunities for questioning, song has better embodied Iranians’ voice of patriotism than the official national destabilizing, and reimagining insider/outsider labels. The journey countered my anthems during the last 70 years and has become a medium through which they field experiences in Senegal and the Americas, and opened up these ever-changing have voiced their resistance to political suppression and established their unity in statuses to new significations. The alienation I experienced while learning about diaspora: Iranians sing it in public events and encourage their children to learn it Asafo songs, and the homelessness I felt could only be remedied with ambiguous in pre-school. What musical, symbolic, and social factors have caused "Ey Iran" to and ever-changing labels that rejected dichotomies. Expanding upon Smith’s be used as the unofficial anthem and the "true meaning of patriotism" ("surūd-i observation that "The colonized personality is alienated not only from his color and millī-mīhanī-yi Iran") by three generations of Iranians, both in Iran and its traditional community....", and the legacy of feminist ethnographers--Kisluik, Abu- diaspora? What does a song’s life say about people’s lives? My research positions Lughod, Visweswaran, Altorki, and others, who address and deconstruct this song in relation to the social and political climate of Iran during and after its dichotomies between "self" and "other" or insider/outsider labels, I developed the creation. I argue that the song’s language choices and musical structure, aligned idea of a "thingified other" to explore how I managed the different markers that with classical aesthetic traditions, contribute to its consistent interpretation over were assigned to me. I draw on years of field research, analysis of songs, and a seventy years as a voice independent from the socio-political and religious "historiopoietic" enquiry to stimulate further conversations about the search for hegemony of its time. musical pasts, fieldwork, and identities. 1 Society for Ethnomusicology 63rd Annual Meeting, 2018 Individual Presentation Abstracts Anti-caste Sonic Polities in Contemporary India sense of cognitive freedom and decolonial jouissance for subjects made abject in the Rasika Ajotikar, SOAS / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen hemispheric borderlands. In India, caste has preserved itself through colonial and post-independence eras which starkly reflects in the sonic and musical archives systematically organised to Queens, Cows, and Country: Sounding Gay Rodeos and the Social Dance perpetuate brahmanical (dominant caste) hegemony capitalised and fortified by Swirl European colonial legacies. In contemporary western India, the vidrohi shahiri Kathryn Alexander, University of Arizona jalsa(rebellious music gathering), a musical, literary and performance genre developed by Dalit-bahujan (oppressed caste majority) youth has gained increasing Quintessentially American, country western music promotes a vision of popularity as it reclaims sound and music to invoke anti-brahmanical, anti-caste Americanness predicated on independence, political conservatism, traditional politics to create alternative epistemologies. This is particularly significant given gender roles, Christianity, heterosexuality, and whiteness. Queerness seems the 2014 election win ofthe BJP, the right-wing brahmanical religious antithetical to this vision, yet queer country subcultures exist across the United fundamentalist political party, which has

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