Disharmony of empire: Race and the making of modern musicology in colonial North Africa

“Disharmony of Empire: Race and the Making of Modern Musicology in Colonial North Africa” focuses on the early to mid-20th-century colonial history of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, with a particular emphasis on Morocco during the French Protectorate period of 1912-1956. I examine the initiatives by both French and North African scholars and officials to define, study, and promote indigenous musical genres, including scholarly publications, transcriptions, compositions, conferences, and musical performance. Contentious musicological debates around Arab, Berber, and Black music and identity in North Africa were not only a lens into broader colonialist and nationalist processes, they also revealed the ongoing formulation of racialized sound worlds that impacted the political and social realms. The dissertation is split into two parts. Part One focuses on “Colonial Musicology,” and specifically on the musical projects that French officials and scholars launched in North Africa. These included concert series, conferences, musical education, radio programming, and the staging of musical exhibits in metropolitan France that claimed to represent Arab culture. Most significantly, this also included the flourishing of a vast body of musicological scholarship on North African musics, supported by colonial bodies like the Service des Arts Indigènes in the Moroccan French Protectorate. I argue that such initiatives were technologies of French colonial power and surveillance through which the French asserted expertise on Moroccan music and demonstrated their material support for Moroccan cultural preservation and renovation. I also argue that these colonialist initiatives on music were repeatedly commissioned into a project of racialization of the North African population that served colonial needs, namely the validation and reinforcement of the Arab-Berber racial paradigm, the counterbalancing of Arab and Andalusi cultural dominance with emphasis on Berber art forms, and the minimalization or exclusion of identities and genres outside of this paradigm.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Matsushita, Elizabeth A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cuno, Kenneth
• Burton, Antoinette
• Liebersohn, Harry
• Hertzman, Marc
• Calderwood, Eric

• North Africa
• colonialism
• music
• musicology
• race
• ethnicity
• knowledge
• nationalism

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Elizabeth A. Matsushita

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113320

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113320