This talk interrogates the significance of al-Andalus to the conceptual and practical boundaries of contemporary Europe. Against increasingly powerful xenophobic assertions of European identity, this talk analyzes an alternative topography of Europe through an exploration of the practices and sensibilities cultivated and promoted by musicians specializing in “Andalusian music”—a term that, as I explore, marks a highly contested historical and geographical location. Rather than see this arena of musical practice as a romantic expression of multicultural identity, this talk takes the materiality of this musical practice seriously—the life-forms, geographies and temporalities it effects and the political work it performs on the project of European civilization.
About the Author
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Charles Hirschkind
Charles Hirschkind is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. He is the author of The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, and co-edited the volume (with David Scott), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad an his Interlocutors (2005). His current project is based in southern Spain and explores some of the different ways in which Europe’s Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe’s Christian civilizational identity.