Conference Agenda

Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Jewish population dwindled from 15,000 to 1,200. Affected financially, politically, and theologically by the ideals of the Communist Party, to this day their community is without an ordained rabbi or rabbinical leadership. Since El período especial (1991—2000) the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) became involved in fostering the community’s rebuilding; this included teaching rikudim (Israeli circle dancing). Crypto Jews and converts are drawn to El Patronato synagogue in Havana, where they are given access to the JDC’s pharmacy, computer room with Wifi, a food pantry, and rikudim dance events. The cultural politics at play is embodied by the rikudim dances with strong rueda de casino influence. This paper explores how rikudim in Havana claims a new Jubano identity that negotiates Jewish and Cuban identities.

The twofold trauma – being both traumatized by the Jewish diaspora and by Cuba’s five hundred years of foreign occupation and revolution – of Cuba’s Jewish community has not been addressed in Jewish or music research. More specifically, the reparative endeavor of music within the religious context of the synagogues set in a socialist state has been largely unnoticed by scholarship. This paper investigates the history of rikudim and rueda de casino dance in Cuba with a focus on negotiations of Marxist-Leninist sobriety and the politics of fun. This study is also in dialogue with theorists Anne Cvetkovic and Cathy Caruth to explain the twofold everyday trauma of being a Jubano. Informed by interviews with rikudim organizers in Cuba and an exiled rikudim organizer in Miami, who fled during the Revolution, this case study engages with dance within the Jubano community and its capacity to negotiate a Jewish religious identity in a Cuban socialist state. This study has implications for both Cuban and Jewish studies, functioning as a case study on dance, on its potential as a reparative art, and on its utility as an aesthetic response to the collective trauma of the Cuban Revolution.

“I don’t want to be pregnant. Help me from that at least even if you hurt me.”

This statement, a frank depiction of a woman in distress written haphazardly on scrap paper, appears in the private writings of Irish-born, London-based composer Alicia Adelaide Needham (1863-1945). Although notable in her time for her pan-Celtic activities, parlor songs, and political anthems, Needham’s extensive archival collection, much of which is still unexplored in scholarship (Klein 2022), sheds light on the very personal motivations for her musical and political work as it highlights long-term abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. In addition to depictions of physical violence, the archive reveals a situation of economic abuse, in which Needham’s husband forced her to compose to generate income that he would keep from her. Scholars have explored the varied effects intimate partner violence can have on survivors (Dobash & Dobash 1979, Herman 1992) as well as the visceral affective responses such traumatic archival findings can spark in researchers (Farge 1989). Due to these aspects of her archive and my own affective experience with them, I argue that a radical form of critical biography centering this history of trauma and Needham’s search for agency through her music is essential. Indeed, the violent economy of her marriage was the engine for the nationalist and feminist activism displayed in her creative output.

This paper centers Needham through a close analysis of her essays, diaries, and letters and explores her intentional linking of the suffrage and Irish nationalist movements through her political songs. This maneuvering underscores an effort to challenge the limits of her rights as a married woman in a situation of abuse. Irish nationalism’s power to permeate both the public and private sphere was attractive to feminists like Needham, who were fighting for a public voice on seemingly-private injustices in domestic life (Shanley 1989). Examining Needham’s musical output through the lens of critical biography demonstrates the necessity of assessing the politics of women musical actors in dialogue with their personal circumstances.

Following the February 6th, 2023 earthquake, musicians in Turkey and the diaspora played a critical role in organizing disaster relief and circulating social media posts of missing persons amidst the Turkish government deprioritizing sufficient aid efforts in the southern region. Turkish musicians also quickly released new songs on YouTube, making extensive use of sampling and lyrically recounting the earthquake’s “traumascape” (Tumarkin 2005, 2019) found in news coverage, interviews, and individual social media content. One short-form video of disaster relief workers screaming in unison “Sesimi duyan var mı?” (“Does anyone hear my voice?”) is one of the most frequently sampled and alluded to across these earthquake-related music videos. The workers scream the phrase “Sesimi duyan var mı?” twice and are met with silence, indicating to the listener that anyone remaining under the building’s rubble is presumed deceased. Other recordings within this digitized traumascape highlight people grieving the loss of their families, panicking because they are unable to find their friends and loved ones, and their despair from losing homes with no safe place to go.

In this paper, I draw on digital ethnography and a corpus of earthquake-related music videos on YouTube identified through searching the Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish terms for “earthquake” (deprem, zelzele, and erdhêj, respectively). I analyze the use of sampled media across these music videos and distinguish between independent musicians producing and publishing on YouTube themselves and large-scale productions by record labels subsumed within Turkey’s major media conglomerates. I assert that the independent musicians’ sampling of the earthquake’s sonic traumascape as opposed to lyrically alluding to this traumascape found in Turkish media conglomerates’ videos creates a digitized sonic “counterpublic” (Warner 2002). In this counterpublic, independent musicians weave samples of recorded trauma, criticism of the government’s lack of response, and personal grief, thus creating a digitized space where the musicians and viewers can remember and rearticulate their own traumatic experiences of the earthquake in tension with government-aligned earthquake discourse. Through emphasizing the sonic embedding of the earthquake’s traumascape into popular music, this paper contributes to scholarship on sonic localities of trauma and issues of power within digital spatialities.