This lecture proposes a revision of nationalist Mexican music historiography that takes as point of departure a comparative analysis of two books published in 1930s Mexico City, Daniel Castañeda and Vicente T. Mendoza’s Instrumental precortesiano (1933) and Carlos Chávez’s Hacía una nueva música/Toward a New Music (1932–1937). Following on Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s work, this lecture provides an “acoustically tuned” analysis of these two books as archives of aspirations and desires within the context of a reconceptualization of the notion of musical and sound archives based on practices of listening and imagining. This archival constellation offers a window into understanding the performative relation between modernity and tradition that informs the postrevolutionary Mexican nationalist narrative. The lecture suggests that the counterpoint between the invention of the past and the imagination of the future that the writing of these two books puts in evidence is key in understanding the aspirational essentialism that has informed Mexican music historiography in the last ninety years.

This talk unfolds from a performance in a concert hall on Musqueam territory in Vancouver, British Columbia: a collaboration between Inuk (singular of Inuit) singer Tanya Tagaq and Greenlandic mask dancer, Laakkuluk. This performance allows me to consider slippages between audiences and publics as well as the modes of address both come to expect in concert halls and related venues. Taking up those whom Tagaq call “some people”—“I find it a little ridiculous that some people can take a bite of hamburger from McDonald’s, but if they saw a dead cow on the ground, they’d go, ‘Ewww!’”—I engage with Tanya Tagaq both in her capacity as a performer and as a kind of literary critic: in performing for these implicitly settler publics, Tagaq reads them. I attempt to read these publics alongside her, suggesting that Tagaq has used over time the affordances of mainstream settler conceptions of Indigeneity (writ large) to produce what is at once legible enough to draw in settler audiences and yet increasingly viscerally unsettling for these audiences. I further suggest that “ugly feelings,” usually associated with minority positionings, are what creep up on and mark these audiences (Ngai 2005). Ultimately, I argue that thinking alongside Tanya Tagaq helps us rethink conventional notions of publics by bringing into view dominant settler publics: those publics that remain invisible to themselves as publics even as they exert considerable force in shaping concert halls and adjacent spheres.

Sidis, Indian Muslims of African ancestry, living in the state of Gujarat in western India have navigated the interstices of marginal identities. Sidis have faced anti-black racism, the exoticization and exploitation of their musical performance tradition, and violent targeting based on their religious identity as Muslims. Nevertheless, Sidis’ reverence for their ancestral saints – African Sufis who settled in Gujarat in the fourteenth century – provides the foundation for resilience and the proud preservation of African cultural heritage. The Sidi Sufi devotional tradition centers upon the veneration of Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra, three African Rifai Sufi saints remembered as siblings, using musical instruments in ritual performance contexts that suggest East African origins. Building on the concepts of “ngoma consciousness” and its “spiritual technologies” as propounded by Nkosenathi Koela (University of Cape Town), this presentation examines the devotional song lyrics, musical instruments, and ritual practices of Sidi goma as they forge intergenerational links between Sidi ancestor-saints and ‘descendant’-devotees in western India. Sidi devotional songs, musical instruments and ritual practices are non-written mediums that have allowed for the perpetuation of East African linguistic elements, cultural forms, and healing modalities in western India over the centuries. At the same time, East African ngoma traditions have transformed in diaspora, becoming enrooted in the multivalent religio-cultural landscape of western India. This presentation surveys the preservation and transformation of East African musical and ritual forms in the Sidi Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat.

Sidis, Indian Muslims of African ancestry, living in the state of Gujarat in western India have navigated the interstices of marginal identities. Sidis have faced anti-black racism, the exoticization and exploitation of their musical performance tradition, and violent targeting based on their religious identity as Muslims. Nevertheless, Sidis’ reverence for their ancestral saints – African Sufis who settled in Gujarat in the fourteenth century – provides the foundation for resilience and the proud preservation of African cultural heritage. The Sidi Sufi devotional tradition centers upon the veneration of Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra, three African Rifai Sufi saints remembered as siblings, using musical instruments in ritual performance contexts that suggest East African origins. Building on the concepts of “ngoma consciousness” and its “spiritual technologies” as propounded by Nkosenathi Koela (University of Cape Town), this presentation examines the devotional song lyrics, musical instruments, and ritual practices of Sidi goma as they forge intergenerational links between Sidi ancestor-saints and ‘descendant’-devotees in western India. Sidi devotional songs, musical instruments and ritual practices are non-written mediums that have allowed for the perpetuation of East African linguistic elements, cultural forms, and healing modalities in western India over the centuries. At the same time, East African ngoma traditions have transformed in diaspora, becoming enrooted in the multivalent religio-cultural landscape of western India. This presentation surveys the preservation and transformation of East African musical and ritual forms in the Sidi Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat.

Sidis, Indian Muslims of African ancestry, living in the state of Gujarat in western India have navigated the interstices of marginal identities. Sidis have faced anti-black racism, the exoticization and exploitation of their musical performance tradition, and violent targeting based on their religious identity as Muslims. Nevertheless, Sidis’ reverence for their ancestral saints – African Sufis who settled in Gujarat in the fourteenth century – provides the foundation for resilience and the proud preservation of African cultural heritage. The Sidi Sufi devotional tradition centers upon the veneration of Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra, three African Rifai Sufi saints remembered as siblings, using musical instruments in ritual performance contexts that suggest East African origins. Building on the concepts of “ngoma consciousness” and its “spiritual technologies” as propounded by Nkosenathi Koela (University of Cape Town), this presentation examines the devotional song lyrics, musical instruments, and ritual practices of Sidi goma as they forge intergenerational links between Sidi ancestor-saints and ‘descendant’-devotees in western India. Sidi devotional songs, musical instruments and ritual practices are non-written mediums that have allowed for the perpetuation of East African linguistic elements, cultural forms, and healing modalities in western India over the centuries. At the same time, East African ngoma traditions have transformed in diaspora, becoming enrooted in the multivalent religio-cultural landscape of western India. This presentation surveys the preservation and transformation of East African musical and ritual forms in the Sidi Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat.

Sidis, Indian Muslims of African ancestry, living in the state of Gujarat in western India have navigated the interstices of marginal identities. Sidis have faced anti-black racism, the exoticization and exploitation of their musical performance tradition, and violent targeting based on their religious identity as Muslims. Nevertheless, Sidis’ reverence for their ancestral saints – African Sufis who settled in Gujarat in the fourteenth century – provides the foundation for resilience and the proud preservation of African cultural heritage. The Sidi Sufi devotional tradition centers upon the veneration of Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra, three African Rifai Sufi saints remembered as siblings, using musical instruments in ritual performance contexts that suggest East African origins. Building on the concepts of “ngoma consciousness” and its “spiritual technologies” as propounded by Nkosenathi Koela (University of Cape Town), this presentation examines the devotional song lyrics, musical instruments, and ritual practices of Sidi goma as they forge intergenerational links between Sidi ancestor-saints and ‘descendant’-devotees in western India. Sidi devotional songs, musical instruments and ritual practices are non-written mediums that have allowed for the perpetuation of East African linguistic elements, cultural forms, and healing modalities in western India over the centuries. At the same time, East African ngoma traditions have transformed in diaspora, becoming enrooted in the multivalent religio-cultural landscape of western India. This presentation surveys the preservation and transformation of East African musical and ritual forms in the Sidi Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat.

Sidis, Indian Muslims of African ancestry, living in the state of Gujarat in western India have navigated the interstices of marginal identities. Sidis have faced anti-black racism, the exoticization and exploitation of their musical performance tradition, and violent targeting based on their religious identity as Muslims. Nevertheless, Sidis’ reverence for their ancestral saints – African Sufis who settled in Gujarat in the fourteenth century – provides the foundation for resilience and the proud preservation of African cultural heritage. The Sidi Sufi devotional tradition centers upon the veneration of Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra, three African Rifai Sufi saints remembered as siblings, using musical instruments in ritual performance contexts that suggest East African origins. Building on the concepts of “ngoma consciousness” and its “spiritual technologies” as propounded by Nkosenathi Koela (University of Cape Town), this presentation examines the devotional song lyrics, musical instruments, and ritual practices of Sidi goma as they forge intergenerational links between Sidi ancestor-saints and ‘descendant’-devotees in western India. Sidi devotional songs, musical instruments and ritual practices are non-written mediums that have allowed for the perpetuation of East African linguistic elements, cultural forms, and healing modalities in western India over the centuries. At the same time, East African ngoma traditions have transformed in diaspora, becoming enrooted in the multivalent religio-cultural landscape of western India. This presentation surveys the preservation and transformation of East African musical and ritual forms in the Sidi Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat.