Concert in Jerusalem. (Photo Credit: Michael A. Figueroa)
On April 29th, Michael A. Figueroa will discuss his new book City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem.
Tuesday, April 29, 20256:00 PM - 7:00 PMUCLA Bunche Hall, Rm. 10383
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Organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
About the Book & Talk
It seems obvious that modern Jerusalem, a city that is central to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious imaginaries and the political epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, is a highly contested space. More surprising, perhaps, is that its musical landscape not only reflects these rifts but also helped to define them as the city transitioned to modernity during the twentieth century. In his recent book, City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, Michael A. Figueroa (UNC-Chapel Hill) argues that musical renderings of Jerusalem have been critical to the formation of Israeli political consciousness, as he analyzes representations of Jerusalem as a relation between metaphorical and material states, as an object of longing or forgetting, as an anthropomorphic figure, as a space of liberation that might be appropriated for other landscapes, as a site haunted by commemoration, as a flashpoint for territorializing national identity, as utopian or heterotopian, as hopeless, as Orientalized, as marked by a tension between sacred and profane, as liberatory in discourse, as oppressive in effect. Bringing together theoretical insights from music studies, critical history, and political theory, Figueroa proposes genealogical method as a means for critiquing this spatio-temporal order and for dispelling any notion that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is timeless, intractable, and based on static, essential identities. In his lecture, he will share analyses of musical meaning, political discourse, and public performance from across the long twentieth century (1880s–2010s), in order to reveal how the Israeli-Palestinian crisis’s territorial fixation on Jerusalem has been constructed, historically contingent, and subject to artistic intervention in modernity.
About the Featured Speaker
Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Academic Studies in the Department of Music and Director of the New Faculty Program of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A researcher of the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and its diasporas, he is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press). His writings on music and trauma, Iberian poetry, decoloniality, Arab American aesthetics, and other subjects have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicology, and multiple edited volumes, including Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (University of Michigan Press), a volume for which he served as co-editor. At present, he is finishing a book on race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Arab American performance, entitled Music and Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Self-Critique. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2014.
DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions of our guest speakers and the content of their presentations do not necessarily reflect the views of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Hosting speakers does not constitute an endorsement of the speaker's views or opinions.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, The UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.