Settled and unsettled listening: café culture, colonialism, and multisensory politics in Tunisian-Andalusī music

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines French colonial and early Tunisian nationalist initiatives concerning public music listening practices in 1930s Protectorate Tunisia. Drawing on historical documents from the colonial archive, period travel logs, and Tunisian authors, I offer a history of café listening in Tunis focused on audition of ma’lūf, Tunisian Arab-Andalusī music. Specifically, I analyse a 1935 government-issued mandate directing café owners across the country to play pre-approved recordings of ma’lūf for their clientele. I consider this mandate alongside a co-occurrent policy of the nascent Rashidiyya organisation that prohibited live performance of ma’lūf in cafés. While these approaches appear contradictory – one encouraging ma’lūf listening and the other discouraging it – I demonstrate that French and elite Tunisian actors in fact sought similar goals: rescuing traditional music from neglect and debasement. I explore the way these policies reflected pre-existing ideological tensions among Tunisians around the respectability of music listening in public – especially with regard to class and gender – and how acts of colonial control sought to ‘settle’ ma’lūf listening, challenging Tunisian ‘sensate sovereignty’ (Robinson [2020]. Hungry Listening, Resonant Theory for Indigenous Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and shaping emerging politics of multisensory and embodied listening. This account aims to situate ma’lūf listening within its dense sensory, cultural, and historical contexts, taking into account the social-sonic milieu of the café, colonial anxieties around public radio listening, and the use of music broadcasting to combat threats to colonial control. Finally, I identify examples of present-day approaches to ‘unsettling’ Tunisian listening and reclamation of multisensory musical experience from my ethnographic research.