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,

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