Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:47:57pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
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12I: Making Home Through Music: Diaspora, Heritage, and Belonging in North America Location: Dogwood | |
| Presentation 2 | |
Creating Home(land) in the Bay Area: The Diasporic Presence of Amazigh Musical Communities University of California, Berkeley In the Northern California Bay Area, the band Terga creates a site for connection for several North African diasporic communities, most notably the sizable Amazigh diaspora, a broad term encompassing North African indigenous groups. Choosing most of their repertoire from traditional songs and the music of prominent North African artists, the band’s interpretations of these pieces both connect the members of the diaspora with the idea of home(land) and generate structures of cultural emplacement specific to this community. Scholars in ethnomusicology have located the idea of diasporic community maintenance within musical scenes (Fuarros 2013, Goli 2019) while Amazigh studies has primarily focused on the importance of linguistic, cultural, and legal recognition of the Amazigh people within North African countries. (El Guabli 2023, Lazhar 2017) Grounded in these fields, in this paper, I expand the discussion surrounding diasporic music communities to the context of indigenous groups outside of the United States (Shah 2010) and their patterns of movement in relation to the postcolony. (Mbembe 2001) Drawing on several months of fieldwork in the Bay Area, I situate Terga’s performances and performance practice within this framework to show the complex interplay between sites of cultural articulation in the creation of homelands (and the associated imaginaries) and the work inherent to establishing an Amazigh diasporic presence. Doing so, I trace my interlocutor’s modes of engagement to understand the work of recontextualizing the idea of self and homeland within the context of diaspora. | |
