Sounds of Other Shores : The Musical Poetics of Identity on Kenya's Swahili Coast / Andrew J. Eisenberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eisenberg, Andrew J., 1977- author.

Series:

Music/culture.

Music / Culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Popular music--Kenya--Indian Coast--History and criticism.

Popular music.

Swahili-speaking peoples--Kenya--Indian Coast--Music--History and criticism.

Swahili-speaking peoples.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (276 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Sounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung poetry that emerged as East Africa's first mass-mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emerged in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa during the twentieth century feature particularly dramatic, even flamboyant, appropriations of Indian and Arab sonic gestures and styles. Combining oral history, interpretive ethnography, and musical analysis, Sounds of Other Shores explores how Swahili-speaking Muslims in twentieth-century Mombasa derived pleasure and meaning from acts of transoceanic musical appropriation, arguing that these acts served as ways of reflecting on and mediating the complexities and contradictions associated with being "Swahili" in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. The result is a musical anthropology of Kenyan Swahili subjectivity that reframes longstanding questions about Swahili identity while contributing to broader discussions about identity and citizenship in Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Preface: Hints of Elsewhere

Acknowledgments

Companion Website

A Note on Language

Introduction: Sound, Sense, and Subjectivity in Mombasa

One: A Feeling for the Boundaries: Early Recorded Taarab

Two: The Lullaby of Taarab: Radio and Reflexivity in the 1950s

Three: The Mouths of Professors and Clowns: Indian Taarab

Four: "Mombasa, Mother of the World": Hadrami Tarab

Five: The Musical Philosopher: Zein l'Abdin's Arab Taarab

Six: Sea Change: The Twenty-First Century

Seven: Reorienting Appropriation: Swahili Hip Hop

Epilogue: For a Humanistic Musical Anthropology of the Indian Ocean

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780819501073 ǂq (ebook)

9780819501073

0819501077