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

A study of transoceanic musical appropriation and Swahili ethnic subjectivity on the Kenyan coast

Sounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung poetry that emerged as East Africa's first mass—mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emer...