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Announcing Music In Conflict, Israel and the

Politics of Aesthetic Production

New Book Rexeamines the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Through Music-Making and Cultural Production

Music In Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production, is a new ethnographic study from debut author and ethnomusicologist Nili Belkind. Published in November 2020 by Routledge Press, Music in Conflict is part of the SOAS Studies In

Music Series, curated by the Music Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Music In Conflict explores how music-making shapes the lives and identities individuals and communities in different contexts and geographies of the conflict: In the West Bank, among those living under the injustices of military occupation; in mixed Palestinian-Jewish urban environments in Israel, and among Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose experience is that of strangers in their homeland, but who also move between all these spaces.

View On Publisher's Website:

View Music In Conflict YouTube channel with playlists organized

by chapters

The book is based on fieldwork conducted by Dr. Belkind in the West Bank and Israel since 2011 and focuses on the fraught cultural politics of music-making in Palestine-Israel in the post-Oslo era, in the context of local and geopolitical developments, among them the Arab Spring and Israel’s 2011 social protest. Dr. Belkind’ “followed the conflict” by “following the music” from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes to home rooftops and even a checkpoint. The book tells the stories of a variety of individuals and communities struggling to make meaning of their lives and to envision a different future.

Dr. Belkind brings a nuanced perspective to her examination of the social and aesthetic contexts in which music plays different cultural and sociopolitical roles. Each chapter shifts the narrative lens between Palestine, Israel, and the “border zones” of cultural work,

demonstrating how perspectives on the conflict are always situational, shifting and yet mutually constructed. Her ethnographic gaze also became personalized during her research, with the surfacing of a family story that spans both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

Among those featured in the book are: The Palestine Ensemble of Arabic Music and Al Kamandjâti music conservatory, founded by bouzouq and viola player Ramzi Aburedwan; The Voices of Peace and Shirana choirs of the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center;

The hip hop collective System Ali, which works across national, ethnic, gendered and religious boundaries, and artists who are Palestinian citizens, including singer Amal Murkus and hafla-rock artist Jowan Safadi.

About The Author:

Dr. Nili Belkind holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. She specializes in the music of the Middle East, with a focus on Israel-Palestine, as well as the music of the Caribbean. Her published work covers wide variety of topics including music and

politics, the urban space, social movements, cultural policy, diasporic imaginations, and cultural intimacy within conflict.

Her articles have been published in the Journal of Ethnomusicology, Current Musicology, The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications, Arts and International Affairs; and she has contributed chapters to Mazel Tov Amigos: Jews and Popular Music in the Americas and to Borderlines: Essays on the Mapping and Logic of Place.

Prior to her academic work, Dr. Belkind had a long career in the music industry.