Genealogies of al-Andalus: Music and patrimony in the modern Maghreb.

Abstract

Like its related repertoires in other parts of the urban Maghreb, what is sometimes called the Andalusi musical tradition of Algiers, Tlemcen, and several other western Algerian and Moroccan cities is considered a local, national, and transnational patrimony. Framed as a collective, inalienable, but attenuated inheritance brought to North African shores by refugees from medieval Islamic Iberia, Andalusi music has long been the focus of a passionate community of performers and enthusiasts, many of them drawn from the elite. For its devotees, Andalusi music is closely tied to discourses of urban rootedness, cosmopolitanism, and nostalgia, all of which are channeled through the image of genealogies of master musicians pointing backward to the lost paradise of al-Andalus. In this way, it has been held up as a marker of authenticity that transcends the history of French colonial rule. At the same time, Andalusi music as it is practiced today is rooted in technological, organizational, and discursive forms that in the Maghrebi context arose at the apex of colonial rule; they include the printed book, the amateur association, and the discourse of endangered patrimony. Through a combination of archival and ethnographic research, I suggest that the circulatory patterns that have characterized this musical practice over the past hundred years gave rise to a patrimonial practice that is deeply ambiguous, teeming with tensions and reversals between the public and the private, the national and the local, the oral and the written, the professional and the amateur, the hierarchical and the egalitarian, the modernist and the traditionalist, and keeping and giving. The circulatory practices associated with this musical tradition couple the notion of national patrimony with an intensely genealogical sensibility that valorizes embodied knowledge, gift exchange, the charisma of the exceptional individual, competition, and networks of face-to-face, oral knowledge transmitters. The result is a musical practice that was thoroughly transformed by an early twentieth-century movement of revival, but that continues to be shaped by the genealogical ethos. In this way, Andalusi music is a national patrimony that is rooted in the local and sub-national, a public treasure that is in a sense underground.