Lecture by Michael A. Figueroa
Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Academic Studies,
Department of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In the years following 9/11, Arab Americans have confronted a shifting paradigm of racialization that has altered their orientation to available identity frameworks. In the face of the US surveillance regime, wars abroad, and intensifying Islamophobic and nativist rhetoric driving continuous political upheaval, Arabs have struggled to define themselves in relation to the racial projections of other groups while also negotiating a host of issues—faith, sexuality, class, and otherwise—that shape their sense of self, safety, and belonging. In this lecture, Michael A. Figueroa will share his ethnographic research on musical confrontations with this reality in Arab American communities, drawing on fieldwork in Chicago, Dearborn/Detroit, New York, Oakland/San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. His talk will focus on performers who turn to diverse experimental practices as pathways toward futurity, imagining new social worlds and configurations of community.
Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Academic Studies in the Department of Music and Director of the New Faculty Program of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A researcher of the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and its diasporas, he is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (University of Michigan Press, 2020). His writings on music and trauma, decoloniality, Zionism, Arab American aesthetics, and other subjects have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicology, and multiple edited volumes. At present, he is writing an ethnographic book on experimental performance, race, and sexuality in Arab diasporic communities in the US.
Part of the Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy Colloquium Series, this event is sponsored by The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Ethnomusicology and the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music.