Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace

by Deborah Kapchan

Overview

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance—and indeed all sacred music—is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819501363
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Series:	Music / Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	362
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

DEBORAH KAPCHAN is an associate professor of performance studies at New York University. She is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996).

Deborah A. Kapchan is associate professor of performance studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition and Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace."She translated and edited a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry and is the editor of Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit and Theorizing Sound Writing.

Table of Contents

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Transcription
Introduction: Initiation
PART ONE: THE CULTURE OF POSSESSION
Chapter One: Emplacement
Chapter Two: Intoxication
Chapter Three: "A Gesture Narrowly Divides Us From Chaos": Gesture and Word in Trance Time
Chapter Four: Working the Spirits: The Entranced Body, The Entranced Word
Chapter Five: On the Threshold of a Dream
Chapter Six: The Chellah Gardens
PART TWO: POSSESSING CULTURE
Chapter Seven: Money and the Spirit
Chapter Eight: In France with the Gnawa
Chapter Nine: Narratives of Epiphany
Chapter Ten: Possessing Gnawa Culture: Displaying Sound, Creating History in Dar Gnawa
Chapter Eleven: Conclusion: The Alchemy of the Musical Imagination
Chapter Twelve: Epilogue

What People are Saying About This

Veit Erlmann

“Kapchan takes things, words, actions, and meanings seriously in their inescapably messy intermingling. An original, engrossing and thought-provoking addition to the literature on spirit possession and an eye-opening account of what it means to be “entranced” by culture.”

Susan Slyomovics

"This book is lucid, imaginative, and impressively erudite. It consistently demonstrates the importance of performance in the formation, circulation, and transformation of identity, and pays attention to the workings of image and power in their minutest details."
— Susan Slyomovics, author of The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

From the Publisher

"This book is lucid, imaginative, and impressively erudite. It consistently demonstrates the importance of performance in the formation, circulation, and transformation of identity, and pays attention to the workings of image and power in their minutest details."—Susan Slyomovics, author of The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

"This book is lucid, imaginative, and impressively erudite. It consistently demonstrates the importance of performance in the formation, circulation, and transformation of identity, and pays attention to the workings of image and power in their minutest details."—Susan Slyomovics, author of The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

"Kapchan takes things, words, actions, and meanings seriously in their inescapably messy intermingling. An original, engrossing and thought-provoking addition to the literature on spirit possession and an eye-opening account of what it means to be entranced by culture."—Veit Erlmann, endowed chair of music history, University of Texas at Austin

Editorial Reviews

"Traveling Spirit Masters will ... prove to be of greater interest to students and scholars of Middle East studies."—Jeffrey Callen, Review of Middle East Studies / MESA Bulletin

"This book is lucid, imaginative, and impressively erudite. It consistently demonstrates the importance of performance in the formation, circulation, and transformation of identity, and pays attention to the workings of image and power in their minutest details."—Susan Slyomovics, author of The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

"This book is lucid, imaginative, and impressively erudite. It consistently demonstrates the importance of performance in the formation, circulation, and transformation of identity, and pays attention to the workings of image and power in their minutest details."—Susan Slyomovics, author of The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

"Kapchan takes things, words, actions, and meanings seriously in their inescapably messy intermingling. An original, engrossing and thought-provoking addition to the literature on spirit possession and an eye-opening account of what it means to be entranced by culture."—Veit Erlmann, endowed chair of music history, University of Texas at Austin

From the Publisher