Taking its name from the Arabic term tariba, meaning the ecstatic feelings evoked by true musical artistry, taarab has its origins in court music traditions of the Arab elite of late nineteenth-century Zanzibar and coastal Kenya.

The problem of Muslim belonging in predominantly Christian Kenya has taken on added urgency for academics and policymakers in recent years, in light of attacks by global Islamist militants on Kenyan soil, a massive influx of Muslim migrants from Somalia, and struggles over the future of the country’s Islamic courts system, among other factors. I…[Read more]

NYU graduate seminar in music. Music-GA 2199-002. Version: Spring 2017.

Course Overview

Sound and space are intimately and inextricably linked–perhaps especially when that sound is of the special sort we call “music.” In this seminar we will chart a path through the eclectic, multidisciplinary literature on sound and space, by isolating key…[Read more]

This report summarizes the results of ethnographic research that I carried out in 2011-12 on the music recording industry in Nairobi, Kenya, under the auspices of the European Research Council-funded Music Digitisation Mediation (MusDig) project. For more on MusDig, visit http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk.

This paper represents an early attempt at pulling together ethnographic data collected during a year of fieldwork on digital music production and distribution in Nairobi, Kenya. An early version was presented at “Popular Expression in the ‘Silicon Savannah’: Perspectives on the Digitisation of Art and Life in Kenya,” Goethe InstitutK Nairobi…[Read more]

Despite the passage of relatively uniform copyright legislation throughout East Africa and the formation of regional organizations meant to further standardize these laws, the protection of musical works in East African creative industries has varied significantly within and between Tanzania and Kenya. While enforcement remains weak throughout…[Read more]

This chapter describes a sonorous production of Islamic communitarian privacy in the public spaces of Kenya’s major coastal city. As a palpable alternative to a liberal-democratic social imaginary, this communitarian privacy bears a powerful resonance for struggles over notions of coastal Muslim citizenship in Kenya.