AfroAsian Musical Imaginaries

This book is a collection of papers presented at a colloquium, ‘AfroAsian Musical Imaginaries’ that was organized by the IIC-IRD in collaboration with a project titled ‘RecentringAfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations, 700-1500 AD’ that started from Cape Town in South Africa, but became a multi-institutional one that involved the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Kwazulu-Natal, the University of Cape Town, the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Addis Ababa and the Ambedkar University, Delhi between 2016 and 2021. As part of creating a new scholarship that brings the two continents together, work by various scholars from the project working in uncovering musical connections was brought into conversation with the work of several other scholars and practitioners of music who work on similar themes. From an understanding that music can be an important lens through which cultural connections between parts of the world that have long historical roots can be uncovered, even when the connections have not been adequately identified or acknowledged, the most important question that has been asked in the papers presented here is how this can be done. The book also attempts to point towards how such scholarship and performative interactions can prise open several orthodoxies in the understanding of musical systems.