Jonathan Glasser is assistant professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary.
"Based on more than a decade of research, The Lost Paradise offers
a meticulous and accomplished portrayal of the Andalusian music
milieu in Algiers, Tlemcen and their Moroccan borderlands and a
cultural history of a century-long project of musical revival.
Glasser's work provides a tremendously rich and deeply learned
ethnography of the microhistories of one particular Andalusian
musical tradition."-- "Ethnomusicology Forum"
"Jonathan Glasser's The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban
North Africa is a landmark study of the history and contemporary
practice of musicians and music lovers in the Moroccan-Algerian
border area. In addition to shedding light on a little understood
component of the broader network (what Glasser terms an
archipelago) of Andalusi associations and performance practices,
this important book explores the relationship of cultural heritage
to place, narratives of origin and decline, the ways music can
enliven debates about the dynamics of communal memory and
belonging, and the anxieties of modernity. . . . Glasser strikes
such a fine balance between his archival and field research that he
creates the feeling of conversing with characters long gone (the
early 20th century musician Edmond Yafil, for example) while at the
same time understanding contemporary performers as embedded in a
centuries- long genealogy of performance, communal memory,
storytelling and
place-making."-- "Journal of Arabic Literature"
"Through sophisticated ethnography and painstaking multilingual
archival research, Glasser shapes a compelling narrative about a
notion of the lost. . . . In this book the lost becomes a complex
notion which comes alive through an incisive analysis and the
skilful interweaving of practitioners' and melomanes'
(aficionados') words, sound recordings, printed compilations of
song texts, photographs, transcriptions, and amateur associations.
This is how Glasser invites his readers into an archipelago of
sound, where debates and anxieties about loss and revival are
embedded in the intertwining of the past, the present, and the
future, giving continuity and vitality to Andalusi music. The Lost
Paradise is an essential reference for researchers of the musical
traditions of North Africa and the Middle East, and a crucial work
for scholars of North Africa and beyond."-- "Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute"
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