Lost Paradise

Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa

Glasser Jonathan

For more than a century, urban North Africans have sought to protect and revive Andalusi music, a prestigious Arabic-language performance tradition said to originate in the "lost paradise" of medieval Islamic Spain. Yet despite the Andalusi repertoire's enshrinement as the national classical music of postcolonial North Africa, its devotees continue to describe it as being in danger of disappearance. In "The Lost Paradise", Jonathan Glasser explores the close connection between the paradox of patrimony and the questions of embodiment, genealogy, secrecy, and social class that have long been central to Andalusi musical practice. Through a historical and ethnographic account of the Andalusi music of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their Algerian and Moroccan borderlands since the end of the nineteenth century, Glasser shows how anxiety about Andalusi music's disappearance has emerged from within the practice itself and come to be central to its ethos. The result is a sophisticated examination of musical survival and transformation that is also a meditation on temporality, labor, colonialism and nationalism, and the relationship of the living to the dead.

About the Author

Jonathan Glasser is assistant professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary.

Reviews

"A much-needed study of the North African Andalusi musical tradition that compellingly shows how the familiar tropes of cultural loss and revival have been constituted and experienced through the lens of its musicians and social actors. It will be a crucial resource for scholars of North African and Middle Eastern artistic traditions and should become the essential reference work on Andalusi music in English-language scholarship" – Jane Goodman, Indiana University

"Like the music that is its subject, Glasser's book is beautiful, subtle, and deeply learned – carefully composed, deftly handled, and sensitive. A compelling account of Andalusi music and its milieu both as they exist today and as they have developed since the nineteenth century, this is a theoretically articulate and highly sophisticated ethnography and an absorbing and engaging read, lucidly and elegantly written, with passages of real beauty. This is an insightful cultural history that offers a major contribution to the literature" – James McDougall, University of Oxford

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