This dissertation is a historical study of global interactions between Islamic law and early media industry, exploring the broader social and political context of fatwas written about the phonograph throughout the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter examines fatwas on the phonograph that were issued in what are now the modern states of Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In doing so, the dissertation broadly explores how early European and American phonograph firms targeted Muslim consumers worldwide by producing recordings of Quran recitations, Islamic hymnals, and sung poetry, while Muslim jurists debated the faults and merits of this novel form of capitalist production and consumption in an equally global arena of Islamic jurisprudence. Additionally, the dissertation highlights how fatwas on the phonograph were written at a time when the practice of Islamic law was changing globally, becoming increasingly intertwined with the enlightenment philosophies and ideologies underpinning the legal mechanisms and practices of modern civil law in British and Dutch colonial contexts as well as in Ottoman imperial contexts. Such entanglements saw Islamic law become increasingly employed as a tool of social control in attempts to regulate public life and patterns of behavior derived from custom and new forms of consumption, especially social gatherings revolving around musical entertainment and spectacles of religious vocal recitation. Furthermore, while early Islamic legal debate about the phonograph became embedded within existing legal and philosophical deliberation over issues of sound, vocal recitation, divine revelation, and vernacular amusement, this dissertation suggests that the global phonograph industry ultimately helped galvanize a worldwide discursive shift in Islamic jurisprudence with the adoption of “music” or al-musiqa as a substantive legal category. This process was coeval and intertwined with the modern development of the field of ethnomusicology, which itself was born within a Dutch colonial administration that derived its legal definition of “custom” and “tradition”–including “musical tradition”–from the Islamic legal definition of “custom” or ‘adat.

This dissertation examines how local neighborhood tango music movements--reacting to "for-export" tango and the neoliberal cultural trends of Argentina in the 1990s--have reclaimed and reterritorialized tango as a form of local musical social life and as an approach to musical activism in Buenos Aires over the past 15 years. To most non-Argentines, tango is thought of as a passionate and sensual form of dance. However, tango as a musical culture also has a rich history in the city of Buenos Aires, and not one that is always associated with dancing. Scholars in the late 1990s studied the processes through which tango was deterritorialized, exoticized and transformed into a transnational "for-export" dance phenomenon. More recent works have discussed the ways that, following the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, the government used "for-export" tango as an economic and cultural resource to promote tourism. Moving away from government agendas, my research explores how, parallel to these other phenomena, musicians have been revitalizing tango music as a form of everyday socialization and everyday urban activism in the contemporary neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

Through a musical ethnography of the Almagro neighborhood, home to the city's most thriving not "for-export" tango music scene, I explore how the advent of informal and participatory live musics scenes in small bars in the late `90s allowed for the production of local spaces for musical transmission, urban intimacy, community building, and musical activism for a new generation of tango musicians. Beyond contributing to literature on tango as a contemporary musical form of urban culture in neoliberalizing Buenos Aires, I examine how feelings of locality in contemporary tango scenes are often produced at the complex intersection of sentimentality and post-neoliberal forms of urban activism. In particular, I examine I analyze the neighborhood location of these scenes not only as a physical space where alternative tango cultures developed, but also as a powerful symbolic imaginary where new musical and social practices continue to be constructed on top of powerful historic social imaginaries of the neighborhood.

Because globalized pop music genres like tango are so entrenched in powerful visual and sonic stereotypes, I utilize filmmaking throughout my dissertation as a sensorial mode through which to construct new visual and sensory ways of knowing tango culture. Inspired by theories of observational cinema, visual anthropology, and sensory ethnography, I propose sensory filmmaking as a rich methodological approach to studying the complex social dynamics and sensory aesthetics so integral to the production of meaningful local tango cultures today.

This dissertation is an ethnomusicological study of value and diaspora, centered on the cultural production of carnival in one of the Caribbean’s largest overseas communities: London. While acknowledging the significant economic contributions of the Notting Hill Carnival street festival to the British economy, which generates an estimated �100M during its annual production, the principal aim of this dissertation is to illustrate how non-economic forms of value are produced through carnival that are (or may be at times) external to its market value. This is done by integrating anthropological theories of value with my ethnography of London’s carnival arts scene to better understand how music, cultural practices, festival performances, and even social spaces have come to acquire significance and value among black Britons of Caribbean heritage in particularly meaningful ways. Additionally, considering that Caribbean Britons are an underrepresented, dispossessed, and historically exploited social group, this dissertation argues that attention must be given to the specific ways that structural inequality and asymmetrical power relations in Britain impact the lives of racialized peoples, which also affects how value and meaning are assigned to particular things, activities, spaces, and places by members of marginalized groups. Drawing on 18 months of field research in London between 2013 and 2017, this dissertation illustrates: 1) how carnival art, music, and festival performances in London have been mobilized as a community-oriented, space- and place-making initiative for marginalized black groups in post-WWII Britain; 2) how London-based carnival arts practices help to facilitate sociocultural interconnections between disparate communities within the African/Caribbean diasporas; and 3) how distinct kinds of value (economic, social, cultural, symbolic, and political) are produced and disseminated through carnival-related activities in London.

Through historical and political contextualization, this dissertation aims at deconstructing dominant hip-hop discourses, and their role in the legitimization of the socioracial order. The objective of this work is not solely to critique conservative understandings of hip-hop, but all limited and reductive understandings of hip-hop, including so-called progressive ones. By critically interrogating dominant hip-hop discourses, I not only intend to reveal their biased reliance on ideologies of difference involving race, class, and gender, but also make room for more complex and just understandings of hip-hop. Therefore, by critically interrogating dominant hip-hop discourses and their connections to larger systems of power, the deconstruction work achieved in this dissertation intends to open the door for reimagination work. Relying on archival research, and oral histories with hip-hop participants, this deconstruction work aims to show the wrong ways we’ve commonly been thinking about hip-hop, and to urge to provide new ways to think about it. Focusing on ghetto discourses as particular constructions of Blackness mediated through race, class, and gender, the dissertation analyzes how most commonly accepted understandings of hip-hop are constructed in relation to ghetto discourses.

This dissertation involves the development of a theoretical framework for understanding non-normative gendered vocal subjectivities emergent within counter-hegemonic, experimental vocal performances. In particular, I choose to focus on the extended vocal techniques of Yoko Ono that were developed in the context of her late 1960s and early 1970s collaborations with the Plastic Ono Band, and later came to exert a significant influence upon underground vocalists from the late 1970’s to the present day. As a theoretical foundation for my work, I primarily draw upon post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst, Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspace (2006), adapting her lexicon for the analysis of experimental vocalities. In proposing a musicological appropriation of Ettinger’s rubric, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Ono’s vocal performances actualize a mode of “matrixial gendered resistance,” that is, a feminist aesthetic practice that works to re-contextualize the parameters of gendered subjectivity within a shared space of trans-subjective encounter. While the first two chapters of this dissertation will provide a detailed theorization of Yoko Ono’s early avant-rock musical output in relation to psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and posthumanist thought, the final two chapters will trace Ono’s stylistic influence through punk rock and New Wave genres of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, concluding with a series of interviews with current Los Angeles-based underground vocalists.

This dissertation, based on twelve months of ethnographic research in Bangalore, India, examines the city's six decades-old rock music culture, a rapidly professionalizing musical genre that has been largely overlooked in studies of Indian popular music. Though historically an English-language genre, contemporary Indian rock is performed in myriad regional languages and comprises heavy metal, indie, folk rock, cover songs and a variety of other styles. Observing its predication on the historical and contemporary circulation of transnational popular music media, this research posits Indian rock in Bangalore as significantly shaped by mediation and coextensive commodification: in addition to its grounded performances rock music plays out in a materially configuring and symbolically significant intertextual field composed of mediated sounds, images and discourses found in advertisements, television, print and film. Through historical, textual and ethnographic analysis I explore how these mediations are implicated in the changing symbolic meanings of rock music practices in India, and comprise a modality through which rock music subjects make sense of their own musical projects and their positionality as post-liberalization citizens.

Rock music performance in the context of Bangalore's post-liberalization economic and social reconfigurations is a strategic and reflexive practice in which, through creative forms of musical and lyrical expression, musicians negotiate differential forms of tradition, modernity, locality and globalized positionality via a transnational popular repertoire; rock also, however, functions as a vehicle for the reproduction and re-inscription of socio-economic hierarchies taking new shape in the globalized economy and consumer culture of urban India. Thus a study of Indian rock music culture is instrumental in understanding the emergence of new forms of social identity and new or newly contested forms of globalized nationalism in Bangalore's public culture. Indicative of these concerns about national identity are questions about cultural “authenticity” and musical originality that sound out repeatedly throughout the scene. From the many instances of musicians, producers, and local and international media functionaries demanding a “more Indian” or an “original” sound emerge insights into deeper anxieties about the transformations wrought by cultural globalization and the role of music in mediating such social and cultural changes.

Ireland’s entry into an €85 billion bailout agreement with the tripartite entity known as the “Troika” (IMF-EC-ECB) in 2008 placed the Republic of Ireland under obligation to undergo a comprehensive economic adjustment program between 2010 and 2013. The reforms that followed from this period led the country on a characteristically neoliberal policy trajectory involving significant transformations in Ireland’s national arts infrastructure. This dissertation draws upon eleven months of fieldwork in Ireland and over forty interviews in order to examine how the recession and subsequent adjustment program affected the livelihoods and working conditions of Irish traditional musicians.

As part of the resulting analysis, I explain how the process of structural adjustment led to severe cuts in the public subsidies available to traditional musicians and reoriented national policy further in line with art commodification. This involved a shift from a traditional European model of arts funding, in which the principal support modality is direct subsidy maximization, towards a more American arts funding model, emphasizing the need for artists to act entrepreneurially and to deepen engagement with the private market. The Great Recession also involved heightened attempts among policymakers to leverage traditional music and other Irish arts towards foreign investment and tourism revenue. These dynamics deepened the gap between core supports for traditional musicians and expenditure on cultural programming intended to market or “sell” Ireland abroad.

This dissertation synthesizes the above observations towards three general commentaries on neoliberal structural adjustment and its impact upon Irish musicians. First, I argue that Ireland’s structural adjustment process exemplifies what Naomi Klein (2007) has called “disaster capitalism,” a term she uses to describe the phenomenon in which economic crises are seized upon as opportunities to deepen neoliberal policy within various societies. Second, I argue that the expansion of neoliberal ideas into the domain of the Irish arts was principally facilitated by late 20th century ideas about the “creative economy,” which augmented state interest in traditional music as a means to develop foreign investment throughout the recession. Lastly, I draw upon Karl Marx (1990 [1867]) and Marcel Mauss’s (2002 [1925]) writings on value to show how Irish traditional musicians experienced structural adjustment in terms of a “devaluation” of Irish arts.

This dissertation examines how Egyptian youth use “do-it-yourself” (DIY) music to produce social change under conditions of authoritarianism. DIY music is made by youth, who use low-budget home studios and Internet software to produce innovative new styles that mix Arab musical aesthetics with globally-circulating genres such as hip-hop, rock, jazz, metal, and electronic music. Building from approximately 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt since 2010, it demonstrates how DIY musicians use public listening to transform overwhelming public depression and paranoia in the aftermath of the failed 2011 Egyptian revolution in ways that they believe will make the “coming revolution” successful. In so doing, they reanimate dominant Arab/Islamic philosophies that treat listening as an embodied practice able to transform mood, thought, emotion, and behavior. It argues that under a return to violent authoritarian conditions, which render discursive critique and protest dangerous, DIY music engenders new modes of affective politics that locate persuasion in the listening body’s capacity to feel and affect others. Putting Arab/Islamic philosophies in conversation with theories of the public, affect, sound studies, as well as queer and feminist theories on the body, it expands feminist critique that challenges the centrality of “discourse” and “reason” in dominant Western political models, offering instead an alternative form of politics that privileges public feeling, the body, and indirect action.

This dissertation draws upon ethnographic and archival research conducted in Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United States, and online from 2016 to 2022. I detail four grassroots community popular music archives, Museum Musik Indonesia, the Lokananta Project, Irama Nusantara, and Arsip Jazz Indonesia, established between 2009 and 2016. This dissertation examines the role of Indonesian grassroots archivists in the collection, organization, preservation, and circulation of materials related to jazz in Indonesia. I frame the grassroots archivists as activist archivists who circulate audiovisual media containing histories of people and communities associated with modernity and cosmopolitanism in Indonesia. These people and communities have usually been recognized as outside of straightforward nation-building hero narratives, but the archival record reveals more complex accounts of Indonesian musicians and their relationships with Indonesian nationalism. I consider how the political ideals of emergent archives allow for the Indonesian public to reckon with and reform Indonesian cultural heritage to contain a more vast and varied popular music heritage that includes jazz.The surfacing of these grassroots archives coincides with the politics of post-Suharto Reformasi (1998–present), an era marked by liberal policies and increasingly pluralistic projects. The audiovisual archives create spaces for Indonesians to grapple with their own colonial, postcolonial, and global history through increased historical reverberations, transparency, and self-study. These grassroots archives, as archives from below, provide a record of activities beyond those maintained in institutional archives. The microhistories of jazz in Indonesia disturb, support, or challenge state renderings of history. The objects of archival value produced by the grassroots archivists are used to provide evidence of diverse ethnic and national cultural heritages, including Chinese Indonesian jazz musicians. I determine the actions of these activist archives, despite the tension and constraints of hegemonic co-optation, carry with them the currents of political change beyond the strictures of the state and capitalist music industry.