From the Editor

Abstract

Greetings! This issue begins with a superb and timely piece by Deonte L. Harris entitled “On Race, Value, and the Need to Reimagine Ethnomusicology for the Future.” Drawing from several years of fieldwork in London's carnival arts scene, Harris develops an approach that he calls “value from below,” which illustrates how racial oppression often directly affects how members of BIPOC communities assign value, meaning, and significance to particular things, spaces, places, and actions. He uses this approach to consider the impacts of systemic racism on BIPOC scholars in ethnomusicology, arguing that the growing call for the making of an anti-racist and decolonized ethnomusicology is indicative of the continued struggle over value in the field and the larger world. Michael A. Figueroa's contribution to this issue, “Post-Tarab: Music and Affective Politics in the US SWANA Diaspora,” answers former SEM President Anne K. Rasmussen's call for a “migration of ethnomusicology toward the ‘Diaspora Domestic’” through an ethnographic study of post-tarab, a postmigrant aesthetic practice among musicians and participants in the Southwest Asian and North African diaspora in the United States. In documenting how this emergent musical vernacular promotes a sense of “diasporic affect” among participants through intersubjective musical encounters, Figueroa proposes a concentric model that accounts for post-tarab's metacognitive, liminal, and experiential dimensions, ultimately argueing that an attention to affective politics presents productive challenges to predominant ethnomusicological models of “culture.” Katie Young's fascinating contribution, “Hindi Film Songs in the Home: Gendered Experiences of Singing Popular Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana,” discusses how Dagbamba and Hausa women in 1950s Tamale listened to Hindi film songs in their homes, via gramophone records and through state-run women's radio programs. Hindi film songs were soon integrated into existing domestic singing practices. Through an analysis of oral history interviews as well as recorded performances of Hindi film songs sung by women, men, and youth in Tamale, Young shows how everyday performances of Hindi film songs reveal gendered and intergenerational experiences of domestic space, labor, and social life in Tamale. Morgan James Luker offers “Matrix Listening; or, What and How We Can Learn from Historical Sound Recordings.” Luker discusses the phenomenon of matrix numbers - alphanumeric codes that are inscribed into the run-out area of commercially recorded gramophone discs - and argues that orienting our scholarly listening around what he calls “matrix listening”—can help us reframe our engagement with historical sound recordings as primary sources and thereby lend valuable insights into any number of scholarly questions. It can also help us revisit the issue of materiality in recorded sound specifically and music in general, approaching sound recordings not only as container technologies for “music” as a purified domain but as complexly agentive material things. And Althea SullyCole offers “Listening to Kora in New York City: Constructing Africa and Blackness in the U.S.,” where she draws upon ethnographic fieldwork with New York City-based kora musicians. This article observes how the kora, a twenty-one stringed harp from the Mandé region of West Africa, has become integrated into black cultural expression in the U.S. It highlights the disjunctures between migrant West African kora players and black musicians and audiences in the U.S. that result from particular modes of listening. How these conflicts are manifest in the performance context, the author argues, reveals both who and what means, historically, have been authorized to organize a social imaginary around the idea of “Africa” and its traditions.Special thanks, as always, are due to a core group of people for their hard work, guidance, and assistance in making this Journal the publishing benchmark in our discipline. SEM Executive Director Stephen Stuempfle and SEM President Tomie Hahn continue to assist with encouragement and support. Our current Book Review co-editors (Kate Brucher and Andrew Mall) continue to do fantastic work. As you know, Kate Brucher will be leaving this post in order to serve as the general editor of this Journal. Our Film, Video and Multimedia Review editor, Ben Harbert, is also finishing his service with this issue. Ben will begin working shortly on a new SEM publication (together with myself), as co-editor in-chief of the Journal for Audiovisual Ethnomusicology. And our Recording Review editor Donna Lee Kwon continues her thoughtful editing work with style and grace. Abby Rehard, our Journal's assistant editor, serves with considerable distinction, insight, humor, and aplomb. Kate Kemball, Journal Productions Editor at University of Illinois Press, provides professional insight as always. And thanks are always especially due to the hard-working members of the Journal Editorial Board as well as the SEM Publications Committee for their counsel and insights on various issues that come up in this work.