Absence and ‘presence’: el-Hadhra and the cultural politics of staging Sufi music in Tunisia

Sufisms in North Africa are both esoteric and exoteric; that is, they harbour hidden forms of knowledge and experience known only to initiates but perform them regularly in rituals that are public or semi-public, making them accessible to all. When musics of these rituals are brought onto the concert stage, then, they pose analytical challenges to binaries such as spectatorship/participation, loss/renewal and authenticity/inauthenticity. In Tunisia, the staging of Sufi music has been monopolised for decades by a staged spectacle called el-Hadhra, which, along with its offshoots and competitors, proceeds according to a modular logic of culture in which music, dance, trance and other aspects of ritual are approached as separable, extractable and available for recombination in a plug-and-play manner. This paper unpacks the implications of this logic of modularity through a close reading of el-Hadhra that focuses on strategies of minimising and maximising the 'contextual gap' between ritual and stage performances. The resulting ambiguities, I argue, encourage multiple and sometimes contradictory readings that nevertheless illuminate the musical and ritual chains of value activated by Sufi performance and draw attention to the shifting social, religious and political functions and meanings of Sufism in the Tunisian public sphere.