In this article, I explore narratives of vocal transmission among threads of diasporic relationality-gathering, musical participation, and kinship-woven into my interlocutors' stories about musical learning. Such narratives of transmission, I argue, are nuanced by divergent life histories among Cabo Verdean / Americans, which vary according to generation, island origin, and racial identification. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, I theorize that diasporic actors perform not merely the semiotics of genre but indeed the traces of transmission as a means of claiming belonging within and cohering community across intradiasporic difference. This article brings voice and diaspora studies into dialogue, demonstrating how a fundamentally relational and diverse vision of diaspora might be performed through the cultivation of vocal gesture. Most crucially, the article insists that vocal transmission is in and of itself a complex cultural and aesthetic conciliation, rather than a mere pursuit of musical competency.
This article probes the relationship between hearing and knowledge making in Sinophone thought by examining linguistic, iconographic, and ethnographic representations of aurality. Hearing emerges not only as a privileged epistemic pathway but also as part of a larger sensory complex in which hearing, smelling, and tasting are coextensive sensations. I further argue that this hearingsmelling-tasting sensory complex activates a pronounced attunement to things that are changing and porous-qualities that also animate the thinking of generations of Sinophone literati in their quest to theorize the order of the cosmos. This meditation on Sinitic aurality leads, in the second part of the article, to a more general argument: that to sense the world is already to have taken position on how best to make sense of-and to know-the world. Building on sensory scholarship, I develop the view that the way we make our way around the world is filtered through a socially constructed alignment between sensorial and epistemic orientations, or "sensibility." The final part of the article contends with how the meaning and priorities of music analysis, as an activity contingent on multitudinous definitions of "hearing," must open up in order to reflect a global landscape of sensibilities.
Aline Sitoe Diatta (1920-1944) was a leader in the indigenous religion of the Jola people based in the Casamance region of Senegal. In 1942, a time of drought and intensified colonial extraction, she founded a new shrine that brought sorely needed rains. She also advocated for religious reforms to counter the influence of Christianity, recenter human relationships with the Jola creator Emite, and promote sustenance rice-farming in place of French-imposed cash-cropping. Music was central to Diatta's revivalist movement, and she composed songs to perform during her shrine rituals, but these were never recorded. Inspired by Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub's notion of sound repatriation for an "audible future"-yet vexed by an inaudible past for Diatta's songs-I worked with Jola musician Joel Bassene over the course of three years to create new translations and compositions for a collection of lyrics attributed to Diatta published in 1969. We recorded these new settings with a community chorus in Elubalir (an island village that maintains one of Diatta's shrines) and returned three times for playback-feedback sessions. This essay shares perspectives on Diatta's musical life stemming from this collaborative project, including the role of music in (1) enacting human-spiritual-environmental relationships; (2) creating local agency in global political and climatic crises; and (3) transmitting a critical discourse on religion, colonialism, agriculture, and the environment from a Jola perspective. In addition to these conclusions, this project is a case study in collaborative musicking as an experimental methodology to stimulate communal historical and cultural reflection.
This article traces the circulation of "Dayung Sampan" across East and Southeast Asia and examines the tune's adaptations into different musical genres along the way. Initially performed and recorded in the Indonesian kroncong style, it gained wider regional appeal when adapted as the Mandarin pop "Tian Mimi"in 1979. I explore how these "network traces" inIsland, which reinterprets the tune within Singapore's multicultural context. This hybridization underscores the complex circulation of musical and cultural ideas, challenging essentialist frameworks that rigidly associate genres with fixed ethnic identities. Sunny Island also exemplifies how the concert band can serve as a medium of semantic layering-where accumulated network traces are signified through individual subjectivity to reimagine national identity and cultural memory.
This article employs the notions of density and scale to discuss how musical performances achieve their communicative effects. Describing a dispute over props used for the kulakul, an `amis (Taiwanese Indigenous) dance that functions as sovereign assertion, I show how the choice of umbrellas versus spears organized the dense set of contexts that the dance indexed in intercultural settings. These contexts, in turn, established the scale at which performances functioned, producing (or failing to produce) sovereign sensibility. Reflecting on how the dispute reveals the stakes in a seemingly aesthetic choice, I argue that musical practices, such as dance, afford a means to negotiate competing facets of sovereignty. Finally, the article suggests that attention to scale could be a useful addition to ethnomusicological toolkits.
