Singing with Ghosts: Hauntology and Musical-Culinary Remembrance in Iraqi Jewish Biographical Songs

Lecture Produced by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum Co-sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and American Sephardi Federation Admission: Free

Seventy years after the majority of Jews left Iraq—a mass emigration that marked the largest airlift population transfer to date, and the end of a 2,600 year-old Jewish presence in the area—the history of this community’s dislocation remains hotly debated. In the wake of emerging rival Arab and Jewish ethno-nationalisms, Iraqi Jews found themselves caught in the crossfire between warring ideologies. The community was subjected to a violent resocialization process into Israeli society, where they were forced to publicly abandon their original names, language, and practices of biographical Arabic song-making. This resulted in a deep sense of internalized trauma, or what Ella Shohat refers to as a kind of “visceral schizophrenia.” Nonetheless, in intimate settings, a number of singers continue to maintain secretive practices of biographical Arabic song-making. These occur in conjunction with culinary enactment and remembrance, where singers draw from multi-sensorial resources associated with their former lives in Iraq—thus rendering their exiled pasts relevant through contemporary sensorial evocation.

This presentation by Liliana Carrizo explores these musical-culinary remembrances in relation to theories of ghosting and hauntology as articulated by Iraqi Jewish authors, scholars, and musicians, and brings them into a conversation with the burgeoning field of gastromusicology. Carrizo argues that through the transnational flow of music and the senses—including sound, tactile impressions, aromas, and flavors—individuals creatively embrace and reclaim alternative histories of dislocation, including those scattered by the ashes of war.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speaker

Liliana Carrizo is an ethnomusicologist whose work focuses broadly on music and migration across numerous transregional contexts. She is an assistant professor at Colorado College. Her current book project examines biographical songs of migration and cultural exile among Iraqi Jews. Based on two and half years of ethnographic and archival research, her work considers how interreligious soundscapes associated with Arab, Jewish, and Muslim modal practices converge with biographical, edible, and sonic memories among Iraqi immigrants, wherein singers access powerful, multi-sensorial memories that are crucial to their self-conceptions in the present day. Inspired by her background as a child of Iraqi immigrants raised in New Mexico, Carrizo’s next research project will focus on the music of Arab and Jewish immigrants within the wider regional fabric of the American Southwest.