Sound, Time, and Space in the Middle East and North Africa
Panel 200, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 18 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
From the conceptualization of cities as sites of subaltern empowerment, to the drawing of national boundaries, to the spatiality of conflict, the politics of space has been a prominent and relevant theme in Middle East and North Africa-oriented scholarship in the last decade. So too has a recognition of the endurance of multiple temporal experiences within the scope of Middle Eastern capitalism's "homogenous empty time." Such studies have highlighted the ways in which both place-making and time-making are politically contested and deeply rooted historically.
The authors of this panel hold that a turn toward the sonic can help not only expand the study of such time- and space-making processes, but also reveal new aspects of their intersection via increased attention to culturally specific "soundscapes" in the region. Though wary of assigning a priori significance, we nonetheless take sound's vibrational materiality--and the forms of iterability, duration, and spatial resonance which it suggests--as a generative starting point. How do sound-making practices and audile techniques orient beings in place and time? How does sound's "capture" and circulation--whether through textual means or more commonly-studied sound technologies like recording and amplification--forge new spaces, but also extend (or limit) sonic reverberation? How is the supposed ephemerality of sound belied by the way in which aural experience often evokes other times and places? Moreover, what sorts of political stakes are involved in sonic time- and place-making, particularly where sound is instrumentalized in service of violent military occupation or the production of new forms of political sovereignty?
Bringing together a range of MENA settings including precolonial Morocco and its hinterlands, post-Qaddafi Libya, contemporary Israel and Gaza, and fin de siecle Egypt, these papers build on literature addressing the spatiality in the Middle East, putting it in conversation with an interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding sound studies literature. As such, it contributes to the growing interest in the intersection of sound, space, and time within MENA scholarship.
What does it mean for a state to commune with its subjects? How is sound or the voice implicated in this process? For many, Althusser’s model of the policeman hailing a pedestrian remains an evocative representation of how vocal or sonic power is derived from state institutions. In contemporary Morocco, however, state religious actors are striving not only to revive distinctly “Moroccan” styles of pedagogy relevant to Qur’an recitation, but to involve a wider public in such pedagogies through mass media. Thus, the question seems to be less about the state hailing its subjects and rather: how does the state discipline its subjects vocally?
In this paper I explore these questions through an ethnographic study of “Learn How to Recite the Qur’an” (Ta‘llum Naqra’ al-Qur’an), a weekly program on the Moroccan state-funded radio station Idha‘at Mohammed Assadiss lil-Qur’an al-Karim. The program content includes explanation and performative demonstration of the proper rules of Qur’an recitation, known as ahkam al-tajwid, which ensure adherence to a distinctly “Moroccan” recital known as riwayat Warsh. Additionally, each episode offers opportunities for listeners to call in to the broadcast, recite on air, and receive real-time critical feedback from the expert hosts. Building on an analysis of the content of dozens of episodes, I turn as well to the ethnographic “backstage” of the program’s production booth, highlighting both the technological elements involved in production and the way in which callers are disciplined verbally by the program’s producer before being allowed, vocally, on air. Thus, I argue, the program’s avenues of participation function as a form of electrosonic statecraft, one that aims at a type of vocal perfection but because of its spatial and temporal limitations, inevitably fails to fulfill this promise.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with citizens and trauma specialists residing within the four kilometer perimeter of Israel’s border with Gaza, this paper explores the politics of Israel’s civil defense siren with a particular focus on the ways in which the siren sound, and lived experience of sound more generally, contributes to localized conceptions of Zionism and national security. It argues that within the political framework of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the “Code Red,” or “Tzeva Adom,” siren represents a vehicle of power that is grounded not only in civilian and military authority but also in its coercive and generative capacity to impact the human body both individually and as a collective through its specifically sonic and temporal characteristics. Citizens in this region have specific relationships with this sound, appropriating it for a variety of unofficial purposes. The siren sound, which may resonate more than ten times per day during periods of heightened political tension, constitutes a political and social act, reverberating in multiple registers as its material and sonic qualities collapse distances between state projects, ideological persuasions, and individual bodies. Understanding this sound-power is essential in unpacking the relationship between these Israeli citizens, their state, and the conflict that structures their daily lives. As such, sound-power understood in these terms represents a dimension of Foucaultian governmentality—an organizing practice that produces a particular type of citizen and structures modalities of resistance.
In Summer 2016 musicians in Tripoli gave a series of concerts at an outdoor seaside venue near the city’s downtown. Families attended and children made the grassy audience seating into a dance floor; members of the nearest militia arrived from their base around the corner and stood off to the side of the stage to watch. Media coverage of the concert series juxtaposed the mundanity of the events with a backdrop of urban militarization. Framed thusly as an exception to a norm of daily violence, music events are easily narrated as resistance to war or the stifled efforts of civil society. This paper suggests a counter-reading which investigates the entanglements of musical and military performances. Aside from lyrics that declare loyalty, how is militia power produced through sound? No militia members performed in these beachside concerts – and the music played had no overtly political content – yet the concerts, this paper argues, were one of many quotidian sonic practices in post-Gaddafi Libya that produced militia authority. The calm environment that enabled summer concerts was neither contrast nor accessory to militia authority; rather, it was a modality through which that authority became known to the populace and thereby constituted as integral to social life. Weaving performance ethnography (undertaken between 2011 and 2017) with an interdisciplinary framework drawn from geography, sound studies, and theories of performativity, this paper illustrates the concurrent production of multiple, contingent, contradictory, and overlapping sovereignties through sound in post-revolution Libya.
Arabic-language commentaries and treatises on music before the nineteenth century dealt with music as an abstract and universal field of philosophical and mathematical inquiry. By the turn of the twentieth, such knowledge production had to contend with the growing corpus of European writing on the music of 'Islam' and the 'Orient'. In the context of the military and cultural expansion of European imperial powers, music scholarship became a crucial battleground. The musical practices of South- and East-Mediterranean societies came to be treated by both European and Arab authors as a key component of an Eastern, Islamic and/or Arab civilization. Depending on the writer, this music was either a marker of authenticity that could be mobilized to face the challenges of European expansion, or another field of backwardness that stood to gain by emulation of European technologies and technics.
Relying on state and corporate archives as well as the Arabic-language press of the time, I chart the ways in which the physical movement of musicians, musical recordings, and writings on ‘Arabic music’ circulated the globe. In the first part of this paper, I describe this discursive transformation through an examination of the writings of such commentators as Lane, Villoteau, Mishaqa, and Shidyaq, as well as the founding scholars of the discipline of Comparative Musicology. In the second part of the paper, I show how that the discursive transformation described above can be partially explained by the changes that related to the commodification of music production. I argue that the national/civilizational spatio-temporal imaginary we now associate with pan-Arabism was at least in part the product of these processes of capitalist cultural commodification, highlighting how these profit-driven commodity distribution circuits furthered the potency and possibility of the Pan-Arab idea.
