The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

Contents, A Note on Transliteration

Contents : A Note on Transliteration Introduction: “Arab”+“Avant-Garde” kay dickinson 1 part i: alternative modernities: norms and innovations 1. Transforming Space: The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music shayna silverstein 37 2. Balancing Integration and Disintegration: Amir Elsaffar and the Contingent Avant-Garde kamran rastegar 74 3. Multisited Avant-Gardes or World Music 2.0? Musicians from Beirut and Beyond between Local Production and Euro-American Reception thomas burkhalter 89 part ii: roots and routes 4. The “People’s Artist” and the Beginnings of the Twentieth-Century Arab Avant-Garde saed muhssin 121 5. Challenging the Status Quo in War-Torn Lebanon: Ziad Rahbani, the Avant-Garde Heir to Musical Tradition sami w. asmar 145 6. A Look at Lightning: The Life and Compositions of Halim El-Dabh michael khoury 165 part iii: political deployments of the avant-garde 7. Sonic Cosmopolitanisms: Experimental Improvised Music and a Lebanese-American Cultural Exchange marina peterson 185 8. Activism and Authenticity: Palestinian and Related Hip-Hop in an International Frame caroline rooney 209 9. Noise and Its Formless Shadows: Egypt’s Extreme Metal as Avant-Garde Nafas Dawsha benjamin j. harbert 229 Selected Discography 273 Contributors 275 Index 283 vii A Note on Transliteration : The Arab Avant-Garde adopts the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (ijmes), electing to omit indicators for long vowels and diacritical markings to signify emphatic letters. An ‫ع‬ (‘ayn) becomes a ‘, and a ‫ء‬ (hamza) a ’. For proper nouns, we have stuck to the most familiar Roman script versions, which frequently do not conform to the ijmes format. Transliterating Arabic, particularly in its varied spoken forms, can never be an exact science. We hope the reader will be patient with any seeming irregularities that arise from the many possible options produced by this process of conversion. ...