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Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.

About the Author

Jim Sykes is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka.

Julia Byl is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta and author of Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present.

Reviews

"Sounding the Indian Ocean adeptly bridges music studies and Indian Ocean scholarship, history and ethnography, to show how music composes and transgresses categories, genealogies, and geographies in Afro-Asiatic seascapes. With a focus on three keywords—music, sound, and listening—fourteen essays by a global range of scholars offer rich cameos of the agency of communities and individuals in mediating space and memory in, and through, sonic life-worlds."—Smriti Srinivas, coeditor of Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds

"Evocative, wide-ranging, and fascinating, like the musics and communities it studies, Sounding the Indian Ocean makes a highly original contribution to Indian Ocean Studies and charts the way for many future paths of exploration."—Ronit Ricci, author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia

"Sounding the Indian Ocean is a finely crafted voyage of discovery across a vast and relatively unexplored musical region, connecting distant geographies, temporalities, sacred practices, and everyday concerns. Drawing together an authoritative body of researchers, it pioneers a conversation about the role of sound and performance in rethinking transoceanic lateral networks and comparative cultural histories, securing the place of ethnomusicological scholarship in the reconstruction of one of the world’s oldest long-distance trading arenas."—Angela Impey, author of Song Walking: Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland

"This remarkable collection counters the inward-facing focus that has characterized most studies of South and Southeast Asian music and opens new pathways for thinking about the circulation of musical histories and forms in this region. It is undoubtedly the definitive, standard-bearing work on the deeply cosmopolitan and interconnected soundworlds of the Indian Ocean."—Davesh Soneji, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India

Awards

Monsoon Book Prize in Archaeology and Anthropology 2024 2024, German University of Technology in Oman/GSU