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History in Contemporary Practice: Syria’s Music Canon*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Nancy E. Currey
Nancy E. Currey*
Affiliation:
University of California at Santa Barbara
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Extract

A consideration of the contemporary musical soundscape in Syria provides unique insights into how Syrians of multiple classes and generations discriminate between critical points in their own past, who they perceive they are today, and how they might think about their future. This review, based on fieldwork in Syria conducted between 1997 and 2001, suggests that people in Syria can use music to negotiate the following complex issues: 1) the struggle between an identity rooted in the modern nation-state of Syria and one rooted in the more traditional concept of ‘Bilad al-Sham’ (roughly ‘the lands governed from Damascus,’ a region that included all of modern Lebanon, as well as portions of Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan); 2) the struggle between a Syrian identity and an Arab identity; and 3) the maintenance of a strongly Arab and necessarily anti-Western canon.

Type
Essays
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Summer 2002 , pp. 9 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2002

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Footnotes

*

The research on which this article is based was funded through the generosity of fellowships from the IIE Fulbright (1998–99) and Fulbright-Hays and Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fellowships (2000–2001).

References

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