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

Andrew Eisenberg (Associate Professor of Music, NYUAD; Global Network Associate Professor of Music, NYU) speaks about his new book, Sounds of Other Shores (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), a study of musical style and ethnic subjectivity on Kenya’s Swahili coast. Combining oral history, interpretive ethnography, and musical analysis, Sounds of Other Shores explores how musicians in twentieth-century Mombasa, Kenya, used Arab and Indian sounds to situate musical style as a space for reflecting on and mediating the paradoxes of being “Swahili” in colonial and postcolonial Kenya.

Host or Publisher NYUAD Institute