On July 12-13, 2019, Tunisian and Libyan musicians accomplished a series of ma’luf concerts in Sfax and Tunis entitled “Malouf Slam.” Malouf (Fr.) or maluf (Eng., from Arabic dialect) is a genre of Andalusian heritage music that is diversely performed across eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya, often in an organized suite of melodies, poetic texts, and rhythms. Malouf Slam was an artistic collaborative, involving institutions such as Breaking the Ice (a Tunisian-Libyan arts initiative) and the Goethe Institute of Tunis; Tunisian music faculty and students from the Institut Supérieur de Musique (Sfax); Libyan master maluf musicians; and other artists and musicians from Sfax, Tunis, Sousse, and Tripoli. Many operating fields of Foucauldian force collided producing an artistic presentation dedicated to breaking rigid conceptualizations and social stratifications of Andalusian cultural heritage (Fr. patrimoine; Ar. turath), as articulated in Tunisia and Libya. This paper investigates these performative moments and reflects on how modifying form, repertoire, and venue proposed alternative renderings of listening to and inhabiting maluf social and acoustic space. Organizers, patrons, musicians, and listeners of Malouf Slam provide a wealth of ethnographic data informing this study. This paper is presented jointly by a Tunisian music scholar and an American ethnographer—both Ethnomusicologists and creators of the Malouf Slam collaborative—for the purposes of integrating international research methods and theories. Qualitative analysis of the preparation and implementation of Malouf Slam reveal several fault lines within the shared musical heritage of maluf, demonstrating the pervasive trajectories of nation-state ideologies and institutionalization. Additionally, the sedimentation of musical history between the Tunisian and Libyan participants revealed a re-ordering of cultural affinities towards the rich and historical circulations of Andalusian, Ottoman, and Eastern Mediterranean sound worlds. Attending to regional concerns for the survival of heritage (Rouget 2004) and also scholarship on transnational heritage networks (Meskell 2015), this presentation seeks to contribute perspectives on how to methodologically and analytically engage the movement of these rich, musical traditions in the Mediterranean, as well as investigate authority and resistance connected to heritage musics after their institutional calibration and formation.

While there is considerable scholarship on Arab immigration to the United States, little of it addresses the diasporic communities of Arab immigrants who settled along the U.S.-Mexico border. In El Paso, Texas, there is a long-standing Syrian community that, for generations, has evolved uniquely and in isolation of the larger Arab diasporic social and cultural networks. This community began to form in the late nineteenth century when peoples of what was then the province of Greater Syria sought to escape conflict and the stagnant, restrictive conditions of the Ottoman Empire, and left their homeland in search of greater economic and educational opportunities. Many Syrians who settled in El Paso arrived there due to encouragement from steamship agents who urged Syrians to travel first to Mexico in order to avoid waiting for passage to New York and risk susceptibility to travel restrictions imposed by the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the Mexican border provided an alternative route for those who failed the mandatory border health inspection in New York or those who were turned down by physicians working for shipping lines abroad. Multiple forms of corruption, including physician extortion rings, made border crossing from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico into El Paso, Texas a viable, but costly option for Syrians seeking to enter the U.S. The migrant experience, precarious border atmosphere, and prevalent racist attitudes in the U.S. Southwest produced psychic and cultural trauma that continue to impact individual and communal identity of this Syrian diasporic community. As this paper will demonstrate, music often played an instrumental role in the ways that members of this community sought to strengthen or reject communal ties, traces of their family migration story, and their Syrian heritage. Today, feelings of marginalization and exclusion within their precarious borderland experiences dominate the narratives of self-perception that are behind the musical expressions of Syrian-Americans in El Paso. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper explores the relationship between trauma and identity through an examination of musical taste and expression among the Syrian community on the U.S.-Mexico border. Engaging the works of Jeffrey Olick, Neil Smelser, and Michael Ungar, this paper interrogates theories of cultural and psychological trauma and borderland epistemologies as a means of exploring how border tensions influence the often-fraught views of identity on the border and the distinctive musical practices of Syrian-Americans therein.

In this paper, I critique previous scholarship on mahraganat, a relatively new genre of music in Egypt that emerged around 2004/5. Mahraganat originated in poor low-income, working-class neighborhoods and has become one of the most popular genres in Egypt since the 2011 revolution. Studies of mahraganat in the existing literature often reflect the orientalist and classist views of their scholars and writers. I redress these perceptions by examining the relationship between class and the politics of respectability in the Egyptian media as well as in existing scholarly accounts. By focusing on the case of Hamo Bika, a famous mahraganat singer, I highlight the power dynamics between the working class, who make up most of the mahraganat fan base, and the middle and upper class in Egypt. State institutions, primarily the Musician’s Syndicate, which is responsible for issuing memberships and permits for those involved in Egypt’s music industry, has initially prohibited Bika from performing inside the country, and have denied him membership. Since the third week of February 2020, the Syndicate has banned all mahraganat artists from performing in all venues across the country. The ban included Hassan Shakosh, another famous mahraganat artist whose song/mahragan ranked number 1 on SoundCloud's charts globally in the same week the ban was issued. Bika and Shakosh's cases paint a picture of how class/power dynamics and politics of respectability have manifested themselves into shaping the relationships between mahraganat artists and the state. One example to illustrate these politics, the Syndicate requires members to have college degrees, and Hamo Bika is illiterate, hence, he cannot be a member according to the law. Mahraganat artists are also accused of ruining the people's "traditional" taste by making their music, which feeds into the politics of respectability. Hence, I argue that mahraganat artists create a space of resilience and resistance through their innovative ideas and praxis. The whole process of mahraganat production is done away from the eyes of the state, due to the use of hacked software in the mahraganat production, and due to the high consumption of the music online.

Coping with the trauma of exile: two cases of Palestinian composers making music in the diaspora. Loab Hammoud (University of Haifa) The year 1948 marked a turn in the modern history of Palestine and the Palestinian people. In 1948, the state of Israel was established on Palestinian land causing Al-Nakba (the Arabic word for disaster or catastrophe, which after 1948 became the proper name for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the establishment of the state of Israel). Through forced displacement, many Palestinians lost their lands and family homesteads, along with their connections to family and relatives, and ended up being scattered across refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Arab cultural life in Palestine was upset and the music scene underwent massive upheaval by the dispersal of many Palestinian Arab musicians to different Arab countries. The development of the music scene in historic Palestine was stalled, and in the ensuing decades, while the music production focused mainly on resistance and national music. Meanwhile, displaced Palestinian composers became active in their host countries, to the great benefit of local music scenes. In most scholarly discussions of music in Palestine, musicians living the ordeal of Palestinian exile have been conspicuously absent from academic undertakings. Most studies on music in Palestine and among Palestinian musicians have focused on the conflict with Israel, folk, national and resistance music. The proposed paper will explore two case studies: Rawhi al-Khamash (1923-1998) who was a Palestinian composer that established a stable musical career in exile in Iraq, and Riyad al-Bandak (1926-1992) who was likewise an exiled Palestinian composer, but remained mobile, moving among Middle Eastern countries. I will investigate the strategies those composers practiced to: adapt to their new locations, to cope with their trauma of exile, to establish musical careers in their Arab host countries, their contribution to the musical scene in their host countries, and what are the outcomes of this interaction with their new place(s)?