Prof. Kimberly Mack - “Big Mama Thornton, Cynthia Dagnal-Myron, and the Power of Black Women’s Narratives” WED OCT 26 AT 4PM

Symposium: "Can't Be Faded: Writing New Orleans Brass Band History w/ The Stooges Brass Band" (Tues May 3 8pm EST)

Symposium: “Gendering Africa: Musical Perspectives” (Friday March 4, 2022)

“Gendering Africa: Musical Perspectives” 

Friday, March 4, 2022
(all day, online, registration required)

“Gendering Africa: Musical Perspectives” is a day-long online symposium hosted by the Center for Ethnomusicology, in the Department of Music at Columbia University. It will feature presentations from African and African-descended women ethnomusicologists and performers who center sub-Saharan Africa in the ongoing conversation concerning gender and music. It is designed to locate, highlight and put in dialogue the perspectives and lived experiences of women of African descent in the discourse on gender and music in Africa. This focus resists both sub-Saharan Africa’s peripheral status within the discourse on gender and music and the neglect of gender perspectives within Africanist ethnomusicology on topics ranging from performance practices to musical instruments to music and identity. Topics covered also represent a broad geographical scope that clarify the depth and breadth of the African landscape in the conversation on music and gender. Click here for full-sized poster image.

Registration is free but required. Register in advance for Symposium at this link:

https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYudemrrzMrHNKmmqMxgP-TA_J0yA-XEh9g

Full program below or click here to view as PDF.

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Featured Speakers and Performers

Dr. Jean Ngoya Kidula is Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of Georgia in the USA.  Her research has centered on ritual and religious music of Africa and its historic and present diaspora, centering on Christianity. Her award-winning book Music in Kenyan Christianity: Logooli Religious Song exemplifies her specific focus on Eastern Africa. Ngoya Kidula also interrogates traditional canons in music studies in Africa and the US.

Onyeka Onwenu is a Nigerian singer, songwriter, actress, social activist, journalist and public administrator. She blends popular, folk, and gospel into what she calls development music. Onyeka Onwenu uses her art to address social issues of the time. Her recent book My Father’s Daughter,” has been described as “a riveting narration of Onyeka Onwenu’s enthralling journey through life. We are held captive as she takes us into her world -from the heart-warming affection of her father to living through the anguish of the Nigeria-Biafra war, from a remarkable mother’s love to family intrigues, from feminism to a career that has put her in the limelight for decades. Ma Onwenu is a graduate of Wellesley College, Wellesley Massachusetts and the New School for Social Research in New York.

Dr. Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum is a researcher, scholar, teacher, and performer of African and Black Atlantic music styles and traditions. Currently working on Black People, Thank You!, the third in the Walking with My Ancestors’ award-winning performance sequence, she is a professor of ethnomusicology at Illinois State University at Normal, IL. Aduonum’s methods blend creative expression, scholarship, and experimental performance; her teaching of undergraduate and graduate students is organic and original, often through call and response and creative activities. She employs de-colonialist discursive frameworks to foreground experiential approaches and performative-scholarly discourse. 

Stephanie Shonekan is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Science and Professor of Music at the University of Missouri. In 2003, she earned a PhD in Ethnomusicology and Folklore with a minor in African American Studies from Indiana University. From 2003-2011, she taught at Columbia College Chicago, and from 2011-2018, she was a faculty member at the University of Missouri in the Black Studies Department and the School of Music. From 2015-2018, she was chair of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri.  From 2018-2020, she was professor and chair of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Shonekan's dual heritage combining West Africa with the West Indies allows her to straddle the black world comfortably.  She has published articles on afrobeat, Fela Kuti, as well as American and Nigerian hip-hop.  Her publications explore the nexus where identity, history, culture and music meet. Her books include  The Life of Camilla Williams, African American Classical Singer and Opera Diva (2011), Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015), Black Lives Matter & Music (2018), and Black Resistance in the Americas (2018).

Dr. Marceline Saibou is an Assistant Professor of music at Bowdoin College. Her research focuses on popular music in postcolonial Togo, in particular on articulations between music and state power. Her more recent work engages questions of music and disability in West Africa. She earned her doctorate in ethnomusicology from Columbia University.

Dr. Krystal Klingenberg is a curator of music in the division of Cultural and Community Life at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Previously she held professorial positions at Swarthmore College and the University of Hartford. She received her PhD in May 2019 from the Music Department of Harvard University, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. Her dissertation-turned-book project is on the creation and distribution of Ugandan mainstream popular music.

Dr. Ruth Opara is an Assistant Professor of Music Histories and Cultures in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. Her research interests include African and African diasporic music traditions and the production of knowledge; women in music and the decolonial discourse; music and gender; African music and transnational encounters. 

Althea SullyCole is an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist from New York City. She has studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed harp from the Mandé region of West Africa, for 10 years, 3 of which were spent in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She is also a Sylvan C. and Pam Coleman Memorial Fellow in the Musical Instrument Department at the MET, where she is conducting an interdisciplinary study of the MET’s collection of musical instruments from the Mande region of West Africa. She is particularly interested in how a detailed, comparative study of these instruments might help address questions regarding cultural belonging and identity formation both within the Mande context and the larger African diaspora.

Shirley (Ratidzai) Chikukwa is a Zimbabwean-born ethnomusicologist and a third-year PhD student at Columbia University. Shirley’s research interests include worship practices in Zimbabwe Pentecostal churches, Zimbabwean choral music traditions, the development of Zimbabwean hymn traditions, and contemporary Christian musical repertoires in Pentecostal Zimbabwean churches. She currently serves as a Core Curriculum instructor at Columbia University, teaching Music Humanities. Shirley received her Bachelor of Arts in Music History and Theory from California State University, Fullerton.

Amarachi Attamah is a graduate student in the Department of Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Preservation at Syracuse University, New York State. She is a Chant Performer, Poet, Broadcaster, and a Mother-Tongue Advocate. Her core interests are indigenous language sustainability, culture curation, and intangible heritage preservation. She has performed in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, the United Kingdom (where she recently completed a four-month performance fellowship with the British Royal National Theatre), and the USA.

Laina Dawes is an ethnomusicologist and the author of What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 2012). She is also a music and cultural critic whose writing can be found in print and online magazines, such as Hazlitt, Bitch, SPIN, Cuepoint, Wondering Sound, Flavorwire, Refinery29, MTV Iggy, MySpace, The Wire UK, NPR, Toronto Star and Exclaim! Canada.

Lauren Bernard is a PhD student in Historical Musicology at Columbia University. Her current research interests include the perception of race in timbre and sound, musical constructions of alterity and identity, and Afrofuturism.

Symposium Organizers:
Ruth Opara Ph.D. 
Althea SullyCole                   
Shirley Chikukwa    
Aaron A. Fox Ph.D.

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Event Sponsors:
The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, The Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, The Committee on Equity and Diversity of the Columbia University School of Arts and Sciences, The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University,  The Department of Art and Music Histories in the College of Arts and Sciences  at the University of Syracuse, the Institute for African Studies at Columbia University, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and the Department of Music at Columbia University. 

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SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
(click here to download full program, with all speaker bios and presentation abstracts,  as PDF) 
All times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Friday, March 4, 2022

MORNING SESSION:

10:00AM -- Opening Remarks — Dr. Ruth Opara (Syracuse University)

10:30AM-- Keynote Address
Dr. Jean Ngoya Kidula (University of Georgia): 

(Re)Presenting African Women in Music: Conventions and Paradoxes 
(introduced by Althea SullyCole)

11:30AM -- Panel A: Reflexivity, Movement, and Displacement

Althea SullyCole (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University): Hearing Jinns: Intersections of Gender and Materialism in the Met’s Historical Collection of Mandé Harps

Dr. Krystal Klingenberg (Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History): Daughtering in the Field: Research Deferred in a World Disrupted by Pandemic

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan (University of Missouri): “Bridge over Troubled Water”: How Africana Women Artists Build Bridges across the Atlantic

Panel Chair: Lauren Bernard

AFTERNOON SESSION

1:00PM -- Performance 
“Igbo Chant Poetry” by Amarachi Attamah (Syracuse University) 
(introduced by Dr. Ruth Opara)

1:30PM -- Artist Address: Onyeka Onwenu 
"Being a Woman, Singer, Activist, and Politician in Nigeria” 
(introduced by Dr. Ruth Opara)

2:30PM-- Panel B: Social Justice and Identity

Shirley Chikukwa (Columbia University): The Contemporary, Christian Zimbabwean: Finding National Identity through Church Worship

Dr. Ruth Opara (Syracuse University): Music and the African Girl Child: Persistence and Resistance in the Igbo, Nigerian Pot Drum Music

Dr. Marceline Saibou (Bowdoin College): Neutralizing Stigma: Gender, Disability, and Power in Religious Popular Music in Togo

Panel Chair: Laina Dawes

4:00PM -- Performance 
Dr. Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum (Illinois State University): “Walking with My Ancestors: In Search for Our Great Mothers’ Gardens” 
(introduced by Shirley Chikukwa)

5:00PM -- Closing Remarks — Aaron A. Fox, Director, Center for Ethnomusicology

Book Launch! Nili Belkind's "Music in Conflict Palestine, Israel & the Politics of Aesthetic Production" (April 22, noon NYC)

Hosted by Dr. Moshe Morad with performances by Amal Murkus and members of System Ali 

The event will be live broadcast from Jaffa, Israel over ZOOM, and is free and open to the general public. Join us on Zoom on:. 

THURSDAY APRIL 22, 2021

7PM JAFFA

5PM LONDON

12 NOON NEW YORK CITY

9AM LOS ANGELES

ZOOM LINK: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9895566225

(Live event to be held at the Jaffa Theater, a stage for Arab and Hebrew culture)

Dr. Nili Belkind, who holds the PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University (2014), will be in conversation with Dr. Mosha Morad, and with artists and students worldwide, about her new book Music in Conflict (Routledge in 2021). The book examines how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intersects with music making and cultural production.  The event will feature live musical performances from Amal Murkus (Soundcloud) and members of System Ali (website).

See a promotional video for the book "Music in Conflict" here. (YouTube link)

In cooperation with SOAS (London), The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Columbia University's Center for Ethnomusicology. 

Conference: "Music and Migration" -- March 5-6 at the Center for Ethnomusicology

Prof. Barbara Titus - "Sonic Entanglements on Tour: Visiting Colonial Sound Archives in the Early Twenty-First Century"

Sonic Entanglements on Tour: Visiting Colonial Sound Archives in the Early Twenty-First Century

Dr. Luis-Manuel Garcia: "The Call as Sonic Act: Engagement, Interpellation, Ethics" (Tuesday Nov. 5, 4PM)

The Center for Ethnomusicology is pleased to present a public talk by:

Dr. Luis-Manuel Garcia

"The Call as Sonic Act: Engagement, Interpellation, Ethic."

Columbia University Morningside Campus (116th and Broadway)
Reception to Follow

As with all Center events:
Free and Open to All People, Children and Caregivers Welcome

For special accommodations or further information contact: 
aaf19@columbia.edu

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2405876102857144/

Speaker Biography:

Luis-Manuel Garcia is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is also a member and resident DJ of Room 4 Resistance, a Berlin-based queer intersectional rave collective. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a focus on affect, intimacy, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. He is currently researching ‘techno-tourism’ and musical mobility in Berlin while completing a monograph entitled, Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor.

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Selected Publications of Dr. Garcia:

Garcia, L-M 2018, Whose refuge, this house? the estrangement of queers of color in electronic dance music. in FE Maus & S Whiteley (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness. Oxford University Press, Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793525.013.49

Garcia, L-M 2016, 'Beats, Flesh, and Grain', Sound Studies, vol. 1, pp. 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079072

Garcia, L-M 2016, 'Techno-Tourism and Postindustrial Neo-Romanticism in Berlin's Electronic Dance Music Scenes', Tourist Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 276-295. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037

Garcia, L-M 2018, ‘With Every Inconceivable Finesse, Excess, and Good Music’: Sex, Affect, and Techno at Snax Club in Berlin. in N Gregor & T Irvine (eds), Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor. Berghahn Books Inc., New York, pp. 73-96.

Garcia, L-M 2018, 'Agonistic festivities: urban nightlife scenes and the sociability of ‘anti-social’ fun', Annals of Leisure Research, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 462-479. https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2017.1398097

Andrew Jones - "The Far East Sound in Jamaica" (Sept. 19, 7:30PM)

The Program in Chinese Literature and Culture and the Center for Ethnomusicology Jointly Present:

The 'Far East Sound' In Jamaica

Andrew F. Jones

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 7:30 p.m. 

Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Room 622 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

This lecture by Andrew Jones revolves around a cohort of Hakka Chinese entrepreneurs, record producers, and studio musicians who played an outsized role in shaping Jamaica's most important cultural export, reggae music. Chinese-Jamaican producers like Clive Chin and Herman Chin-Loy not only recorded and marketed some of the first examples of the vastly influential and innovative genre of studio remixes known as dub music, but also contributed to the rise of a new and historically plangent subgenre in reggae called the "far east sound." This presentation will explore how "China" sounded in the seemingly unlikely setting of a newly independent Afro-Caribbean island nation, and what this genre of music might tell us about imperial history, migrations of labor and capital, music technology, and the sonic shaping of a postcolonial “home.”

Andrew F. Jones is Louis B. Agassiz Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Berkeley and teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. He is the author of three books on music: Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, and the forthcoming Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s. He has also written Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture, and translated literary works by Yu Hua and Eileen Chang. 

Co-sponsored by Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

Indigenous Hip Hop Artists & Activists Dioganhdih and Chhoti Maa at the Center, Friday Sept. 6, 4-6PM

Dioganhdih & Chhoti Maa

Friday, September 6, 2019
4:00PM to 6:00PM (reception to follow)
701C Dodge Hall, on the Columbia University Morningside Campus
(@ Broadway and 116th St.)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC -- SPACE IS LIMITED, COME ON TIME

To reserve space or request special accommodations, or for more information, please write to aaf19@columbia.edu

Artist Biographies:

DIOGANHDIH
ARTIST STATEMENT 
Dioganhdih is a queer indigenous hip-hop artist and producer making waves in space where cis+heteronormative culture often remains unchallenged. Shouldering the strength and resilience of their Kanien'kehá:ka and Tsa’la’gi lineage, Dio’s vocal and hip-hop performance is a poetic and lyrical affront to colonialism. Dio’s vision is reflective of their Haudenosaunee ancestors inherent honoring of the Earth and commitment to intertribal relations, civic art and cultural engagement.

Dio Ganhdih (Akwesasne-Mohawk) was born on the Onondaga Nation territory in so-called upstate “New York.” Their introduction to music was through traditional Haudenosaunee ceremony and giving thanks. From early, Dio was surrounded by the celebration of Haudenosaunee culture, laying tempo and lending rhythm to the cultivation of their musical career. 

Dio took their attention for music and love for poetry in hip-hop and started rapping, freestyling, composing and producing music. Dio found mentors and producers in the hip-hop community who were rooted in the culture of radical Black, Afro-Indigenous resistance. 
Rap and lyricism have become a medium for Dio to create larger conversations within indigenous communities about sexuality, gender identity, re-indigenizing and exploring an urban native lifestyle while preserving traditional indigenous culture.

PRESENT
Dio has performed at Stanford, Duke, Yale, Brown University, Oceti Sakowin Standing Rock, SolCollective in Sacramento, Club Gretchen in Berlin, Asinabka Film & Media Festival in Ottawa, House of Vans in Brooklyn, the SoundCloud Summer Party in Berlin, The Chapel in San Francisco, The Art House in New Orleans, and countless dj booths, stoops, bodegas, rooftops and park benches

Soundcloud Instagram Facebook Twitter 

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CHHOTI MAA

Chhoti Maa is a multidisciplinary cultural producer & organizer with 12 years of experience.
Chhoti Maa was born in Guanajuato, Mexico. She is based in Oakland, California.

Chhoti Maa is a multidisciplinary cultural producer, working through art, music, writing, red medicine and danza.

Chhoti has self-released 6 projects (2 lps, 4 eps) in her eleven years as an MC / singer / producer. Her sound work is rooted in hip hop, migrantsoul, neufolk, Mexican oral tradition, specifically her Grandma's storytelling magic.

Chhoti Maa has performed, collaborated and taught children, teens and adults in festivals, conferences, house shows, community spaces, museums, theaters, galleries, schools, universities and in the streets of Puerto Rico, China, Cuba, Spain, Qatar, U.A.E., Ghana, Peru, Mexico, Sweden, Canada, the US and multiple Indigenous Nations.

Chhoti’s work deals with decolonial living, intersectional solidarity, contemporary Indigenous spirituality, queerness, migrant empowerment and the reconstruction of the womxn temple. 
 
Chhoti Maa has received the following awards and grants to support her work as a musician and as a music event curator.

• 2019 - Atiza music video selected for 22nd Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, Austin, TX

• 2018 - Selected Artist for Joyful Noise’s White Label Series, Bloomington, IN

• 2018 - 4th Place in 14th Annual QWOC Film Festival, QWOCMAP, San Francisco, CA

• 2017 - Women's Audio Mission Artist Residency, WAM, San Francisco, CA

• 2017 - Beloved Community Fund, Akonadi Foundation, Oakland, CA

• 2012 - MusixMatch Award, "Los Hijos del Sonido Volador", Music Hack Day, Sonar 19' Festival Internacional de Música Avanzada y New Media Art, Barcelona, España

Access to music on various platforms: https://song.link/chhotimaa
Social Media: Chhoti Maa on youtube, instagram, facebook, twitter, bandsintown, songkick & official website.