This book is a collection of papers presented at a colloquium on ‘AfroAsian Musical Imaginaries’ that was organized by the IIC-IRD (India International Centre-International Research Division) in collaboration with a multi-institutional project titled ‘Recentring AfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations, 700–1500 AD’, 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 an attempt to create a new scholarship that brings the two continents together, work by scholars from the project uncovering musical connections was brought into conversation with the work of other scholars and practitioners of music on similar themes. Based on an understanding that music can be an important lens through which cultural links between parts of the world that have long historical connections can be uncovered, even when these connections have not been adequately identified or acknowledged, the most important question posed by the papers in the book is how this can be done. The book also points towards how such scholarship and performative interactions can prise open several orthodoxies in the understanding of musical systems.
Published in association with India International Centre, New Delhi