Joining the #IAS_NUQ Virtual Event Series, Christopher Silver, author of Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa, examined the history of Jewish music and musicians in North Africa and their social and political impact on the region in the 20th century. Using press archives, colonial paper trails, the literature of the period, and phonographic records, he looked at how the Jewish music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia shaped Jewish-Muslim relations and the transnational connection across the region from the colonial period through decolonization.
About the book*:
A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization.If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities.
With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our present.
*Book description by Stanford University Press
