Sephardic Cosmopolitanism Essay

2 Helmreich 2010

3 Indeed, Jewish experience, as it is the case of the Sephardic exile, frequently implies “multiple experiences of re-diasporization, which do not necessarily succeed each other in historical memory but echo back and forth” (Boyarin 1993).

4 Cf. Newitt 2010

6 See cf. Kubat (Turkey) & Y. Levy (Israel) interpreting ‘Adio Kerida’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxv6FWhQhmQ).

7 This is my own adaptation of Feld’s reflection upon the metaphorical nature of sweat within the context of various performances belonging to jazz cosmopolitanism.

Sepharadscape: The Sonic Phenomenology of Contemporary Sephardic Cosmopolitanism

In recent years, a somewhat US-biased academic trend revolving around the exploration of Jewish sonic landscapes has emerged as part of a broader, older effort to make sense of Jewish music in terms of a defining, enlightening element of its culture (Brook 2006,

Seroussi 2009, Shelleg 2014, Silver 2014). In accordance with such endeavor, this essay deals for the first time with the acoustemology (Feld, 1996, 2012) of Sephardic cosmopolitanism from the late twentieth century to the present day. In emphasizing the interplay of its local and global sonic scapes, I shall intend to make a compelling case for the following hypothesis: the existence of an intractable link between (a) the emergence and consolidation of Sepharadscape as revolving around the epistemic modality of sound, and (b) the articulation of a de-centralized, inclusive Sephardic trans-nationalism of the Iberian Peninsula.
SEPHARDISM AND THE TECHNO-LINGUISTIC REVOLUTION OF MODERNITY
“The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity-asserts Bhabha- emphasizes … the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression” (295). The above quote encapsulates the gist of a historically pernicious tendency in Western thought, i.e., the reduction of the nation to a matter of territorial and linguistic vindication revolving around the eye as its main epistemological modality. It is not by coincidence that Jewish people are indistinctively referred to as either <> (Zionism) or <> (Talmud)…
Indeed, according to the contemporary, hegemonic narrative of ourselves, as human beings our general capacity for semantic (-to-cognitive-) awareness is essentially learned through enculturation into a shared public language via an interaction within a certain linguistic community.

That community which we inhabit (dubbed by Rama La Ciudad Letrada [The Lettered City 1984]) has been built around the symbolic power of the written word, one of whose chief corollaries is the prevalence of the eye over any other sense. Consequently, a totalitarianism of the eyed letter has over-determined the kind of process of educational interpellation (i.e. enculturation) that individuals undergo as they become subjects, i.e., citizens that are thus subject-ed via indoctri-nation to the author-ity of their respective (domi)nations. Such cultural process, unapologetically built around sight and the script as tokens of surveillance and marginalization, has dramatically affected our epistemological potential as individuals and, intractably linked to it, our capacity to build inclusive

nations.
In the case of the Iberian Peninsula, the standardization of Portuguese (1536, via Fernão de Oliveira’s Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa) and Spanish (1492, via Elio Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramatica Castellana) was no doubt propelled by the development of the printing press and the related expansion of writing as a socio-political technique of momentous colonial ramifications. Mindful as he was of the strict bound between the eye, the written discourse and grammar as a means to the end of domination and to the consolidation of a nation as an empire, Nebrija writes as follows in his prologue: