This event is jointly organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Society for Algerian Studies.
Algerian diwan is an Afro-Maghrebi ritual practice predicated on many of the same structures of other musical traditions within popular Islam in North Africa: saint veneration, trance, and ritual healing. Diwan communities were heavily influenced by the local religious practices and socio-political organization of Sufi lineages. While the musical aesthetics ring of sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabic texts and hybrid dances recount Islamic history, the Prophet's life, and Muslim saints such as Abdelqadr Jilani. This presentation analyzes the complex ways in which musical aesthetics in Algeria negotiate and perform politicized identities that are not only wrapped up with concepts of the region and its histories but also with "old" Mediterranean and reconfigured, "African" epistemologies.
Event Details
Speaker: Tamara Turner, King's College London
Chair: John King, Society for Algerian Studies
Date: Wednesday 9 March 2016
Time: 18:00-19:30
Event Hashtag: #LSESufi
Location: Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Attendance: Registration for this event is now closed.
Panelists
Tamara Turner is a researcher in the Music department at King's College London. Her research interests include kinesthetic and bodily epistemologies (particularly relationships between affect vs. cognition), symbolic interactionism, music and altered states of consciousness and religion and medicine within a musical context.