Abstract In this article, I narrate the experience of doing queer diasporic ethnography on Cuban drag and consider how this methodological approach intervenes in ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology. I locate queer diasporic ethnography within a history of writing by Black and Latinx feminist and queer anthropologists, and I discuss how queer diasporic ethnography might engage ethnomusicologists’ understandings of power and positionality, gender and sexuality, and trans/queer vernacular performance. I then recount my own experiences researching Cuban diasporic drag performers in 1980s New York City and contemporary Miami. Overall, I suggest that queer diasporic ethnography might help us as ethnomusicologists to meet the social and political exigencies of our current moment.

Abstract This article challenges a prevailing idea among many scholars in the field of diaspora studies and other disciplines that Palestinians who were dispersed throughout the Arab world do not constitute a real diaspora, since they share the same culture and religion of other Arab populations. Focusing on the individual experiences of Palestinian musicians displaced after al-Nakba in 1948, I suggest the term “fluid diaspora” to describe the elastic and continuous formation of exiled communities. Based on archival materials and interviews with students and family members of the two composers presented in this article, Rawḥī al-Khammāsh and Riyād al-Bandak, I argue that the diasporic behaviors and the coping strategies they adopted in their Arab environment forced them to constantly adapt according to changing conditions. Fluid diaspora is reflected in both the professional and personal practices of al-Khammāsh and al-Bandak.

Abstract This article is a collection of six revised essays from the 2023 Society for Ethnomusicology President's Roundtable “Tell Me a Story” with an introduction and conclusion to contextualize the essays as vehicles for teaching storywork. At the roundtable, we asked: What stories do ethnomusicologists experience, learn, carry, create, embody, and (re)tell? What atypical labors do stories perform that other forms of speech and writing do not? Which stories are left out of our monographs and articles? Six ethnomusicologist storytellers grapple with these foundational questions by telling stories and then reflecting on the stories they tell. We invite readers to consider which stories they derive from their ethnographic experiences, and which stories they refrain from telling, and why.

Abstract The aesthetic practices of the Samburu community have long been intertwined with pastoral mobility, with songs and performances traditionally circulating alongside livestock movements. Musical composition and performance continue to play a central institutional role, allowing individuals to engage with the dynamics of the age class social system—between the renewal of generational repertoires linked to age sets and the perceived immutability of songs and dances associated with men's age grades and women's life stages. This interplay between innovation and preservation in aesthetic production is closely tied to the reproduction and functioning of the age-based institutions that structure Samburu society. Learning to balance these forces is a key aspect of social and political maturation for both men and women. For school-educated and urban Samburu, however, musical activity has long underscored their marginal position within the hierarchies of the age class system through their historic exclusion—or self-exclusion—from local processes of aesthetic creation and performance. In the early 2010s, songs in English and Swahili, promoting Christianity as a way to articulate aspirations of “modernity” and to critique local traditions, began emerging from this sector of Samburu society. Yet limited opportunities for socioeconomic mobility through formal education, combined with the decentralization of power under Kenya's 2010 constitutional reform, have prompted many to reclaim traditional roles within the pastoral institutional system. Rural identities have increasingly become strategic resources for asserting political influence and accessing new forms of economic opportunity. By the mid-2010s, a new generation of urban Samburu artists had developed a musical genre combining African and international popular music with local repertoires tied to age sets and age grades. Bolstered by the widespread diffusion of mobile phones among Kenya's pastoralists, this repertoire has allowed school-educated Samburu to establish a presence within the ritual, social, and political life of their communities. Its growing presence in ceremonial events—such as weddings and circumcisions—has contributed to legitimizing their participation in the ritual sphere and reinforced their recognition within customary forms of authority. The audio examples are available here: https://files.press.uillinois.edu/journals/supplemental/ethno/performing_change_and_preservation/.

Abstract Through ethnography, this article studies the different ways in which two immigrant Chinese women listened to everyday sounds (blender growl, bone cutter shrieks, cleaver thuds) in relation to their environments (mall, supermarket, and kitchen) and to each other. I situate their frictions within dominant tropes of immigration, ethnicity, race, and gender under Canadian multiculturalism, in Chinese history, and through gendered Asian racialization in North America. Following anthropologist Veena Das's formulation of the everyday as sedimented histories in practice, I argue that everyday sounds are abuzz as the messy underside to musical identity articulations and as such may productively unsettle ethnomusicology's own intellectual habitus.