Colloquium: Dr Stephen Wilford (University of Cambridge)

Sounding Dissent in the Algerian Hirak

In February 2019 widespread anti-government protests took place in cities throughout Algeria. As these protests became a weekly occurrence, they coalesced into Hirak, a grassroots political movement calling for greater democracy and social equality, with millions of Algerians joining the protests over the subsequent months. Music and sound became, perhaps inevitably, an integral part of the Hirak, from hip hop videos uploaded and shared online to collective acts of chanting and singing on urban streets. This presentation focuses upon the circulation of music and sound within, and through, the Hirak, exploring the ways in which they have served to challenge structural hegemonies and collectively construct a shared public politics of dissent.

I examine the spaces in which music and sound emerge and are performed, thinking through the ways in which social inequalities and political censorship have served to foreground particular voices within postcolonial Algeria, while obfuscating others. How, I ask, have music and sound been employed to negotiate and reify hegemonic power structures and to challenge political regimes and ideologies? And what might the musics and sounds of the Hirak tell us about the complex negotiation of public and private, and physical and virtual, spaces within Algerian society? Within this context, I suggest that the sounds of the Hirak have forged a form of collective and communal political action that circumvent conventional social divisions along lines of class, education, and gender, beginning the process of constructing a new form of civil society for postcolonial Algeria. 

Stephen Wilford is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and Sound Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge. His research focuses upon the musics and soundscapes of Algeria, both past and present, and in North Africa and among transnational diaspora networks. His work sits at the intersection of ethnomusicology, sound studies, popular music studies, and historical musicology. He has published widely and is currently preparing a monograph (Liverpool University Press) and co-editing two volumes (The British Academy and Routledge). He is the elected Treasurer of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, Secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Ethnomusicology-Ethnochoreology Committee, and an Officer of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Global Online Chapter.