Post-Tarab: Music and Affective Politics in the US SWANA Diaspora

Abstract

In this article, I answer Anne K. Rasmussen's call for a “migration of ethnomusicology toward the ‘Diasporic Domestic’” (2019) through an ethnographic study of post-tarab, a postmigrant aesthetic practice among musicians and participants in the Southwest Asian and North African diaspora in the United States. In documenting how this emergent musical vernacular promotes a sense of “diasporic affect” among participants through intersubjective musical encounters, I propose a concentric model that accounts for post-tarab's metacognitive, liminal, and experiential dimensions. Ultimately, I argue that an attention to affective politics presents productive challenges to predominant ethnomusicological models of “culture.”