In 2022 Philip V. Bohlman, the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History in the Department of Music, won an annual Balzan Prize for his contributions to ethnomusicology scholarship. The prize was both an honor and an opportunity—not only for him but also for the graduate students he mentors. The International Balzan Prize Foundation stipulates that half of the prize’s award be spent on fostering the next generation of excellent research in the award winner’s field.
So with Bohlman’s guidance, a cohort of PhD students embarked on a multiyear project, funded by the prize, to illuminate an important issue in the discipline today: the entanglements of music and migration. Named “Borderlands of Sonic Encounter,” the project will ultimately result in the creation of a website and digital archive of materials from various global border regions, a series of monographs, and local and international events. To kick it all off, the cohort held an inaugural symposium at UChicago in February of 2024.
Through panels titled “Bengali Borderlands,” “Media, Mode, and Mobility,” and “The Middle East,” the symposium participants addressed an incongruity: that, increasingly around the world, the vibrant flow of people and ideas crashes into rigid geopolitical boundaries. By highlighting migrants’ musical experience in borderlands—including literal borders that demarcate nations on maps and figurative borders that people imagine around their identities—ethnomusicologists reveal how people navigate the diverse challenges of migrants’ lives.
“I think it’s important to shed some light on how displaced peoples and stateless people and refugees … have shared experiences but also can have very different experiences,” says Tomal Hossain, AM’22. He presented research based on his ongoing fieldwork with Rohingya refugees, and he also helped organize the symposium as the borderland project’s assistant. “This larger conversation does happen, to some extent, but in political science, in refugee studies, in humanitarian studies. Oftentimes those studies don’t really engage on a deep enough level with musical experience, sensory experience, the cultural meaning-making that takes place daily.”
Hossain describes the nuances of what it means to be a Rohingya Muslim living in the refugee camp that he visits—one of 33 Rohingya refugee camps (as of summer 2024) situated in a site called Cox’s Bazar District in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Rohingya are “stateless through and through,” he says, unlike some refugees who are recognized as citizens of one country despite being forced across borders into others. Rohingya Muslims are denied citizenship by the officially Buddhist Myanmar state, which has also conducted periodic campaigns of ethnic cleansing against them, forcing waves of migration into Bangladesh.
To understand how that intergenerational experience of statelessness informs the self-image of the Rohingya, Hossain focuses on tarana, a song form that often builds on borrowed materials. When repurposing well-known melodies, tarana musicians may riff on the associations of an original song by giving it new lyrics. Hossain describes a “very popular Rohingya love song, which was converted into a tarana song, and so the beloved goes from being a human being to [representing] the land, the country.”
Other songs refer to Islamic ideas about struggle and martyrdom. “You can always look to the afterlife as a sort of reassuring fact of existence in the face of bleak prospects for life in this world,” Hossain explains, something that he believes fuels the popularity of the genre among people who are denied the right to health care, housing, education, and employment.
Like Hossain, other students who participated in the conference have taken part in the everyday lived realities of their research subjects while doing ethnography. But as Varshini Narayanan, AM’20, noted, many of these participants are from immigrant families themselves. The conference featured primarily “not just scholars of color, but especially diasporic scholars,” they say, people who have personal experience of “negotiating a multiplicity—and a contentious multiplicity at that.”
As part of the panel on media, Narayanan presented new exploratory research on the rapper Brodha V, whom they describe as a “Hindu Brahmin hip-hop artist steeped in Black American aesthetics in his body language and dress.” Indicating the figurative borders of identity and politics that diasporic communities negotiate through cultural practices, they note that Brodha V comes from a privileged stratum of India’s caste-based society while drawing on an art form long associated with marginalized communities in the United States. They ask, “What does it mean to espouse Black American and Brown elite Hindu aesthetics in the same artistic expression? What does that do for us in terms of the kinds of borders that can get transgressed and the kinds of communities that can be reached?
“I can send my mom a hip-hop video that has Hindu values built into the text,” they explain, “and all of a sudden, we’re not talking about sex and drugs and all of these things that, for her, are tied to the anxieties of westernization and modernization. That’s a message she can relate to,” and so “the aesthetic values of Indian hip-hop become accessible.
“We live in a multicultural global society,” Narayanan continues. “All borders are fictitious, and yet we also know the immense power of a national or an institutional border in terms of restricting movements, circumscribing people, defining people. There’s this very pressing, urgent need to understand what happens as different borders become legible or less legible over time.”
Ronnie Malley, AM’23, does historically based research inspired by his experience being raised in a musical Palestinian American family. Set in the Andalusian region of medieval Spain, his research highlights the complex multicultural society of the time, which included Arab and Berber Muslims, Arab and European Christians, and Sephardic Jews—a dynamic, cosmopolitan world that he didn’t know about growing up, and that he wishes more people knew about today as they consider the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I wanted to see, what can I glean from this era? Not only were Jewish and Muslim relations at a peak, they thrived and really gave us the new world together: linguistically, culturally, artistically, mathematically, philosophically, scientifically—in so many ways. And that came about from a concentrated, shared experience in creating cultures together from religious diversity,” he says.
To reveal those intertwined cultures in the context of his conference panel, Malley also talked about his experiences as a performing artist presenting his one-person play Ziryab: The Songbird of Andalusia. The story is inspired by the historical figure credited with bringing the oud, a pear-shaped stringed instrument, from medieval Baghdad to Cordoba, Spain, in the ninth century, where it would be transformed first into the lute and later into the modern guitar. Malley is himself an oud and guitar player, and he punctuates the storytelling of the play with snippets of musical performance on both instruments.
In addition to Malley’s discussion of his performances of Ziryab, he also took part in the mehfil—a kind of jam session—that closed the symposium. Embodying the fluidity of cultural exchange, several of the conference participants played music together, mixing their expertise with sounds from different regions and genres.