Sounds of Other Shores: The Musical Poetics of Identity on Kenya’s Swahili Coast

Andrew Eisenberg, Associate Professor of Music at NYUAD and Head of the Music Program there, combines oral history, ethnography, and musical analysis to explore how musicians in twentieth-century Mombasa used Arab and Indian musical influences to navigate questions of identity, belonging, and community on Kenya’s Swahili coast – how musical style became a space for expressing and negotiating what it meant to be Swahili in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. An NYUAD Institute talk.