Farouk Topan and Kai Kresse joined Andrew Eisenberg on stage at the 36th annual Swahili Studies Colloquium in Bayreuth, Germany, for a panel on Sounds of Other Shores.
The event was pared with another launch event for a new translation and critical edition of Kenyan Swahili writer Abdilatif Abdalla’s classic collection of prison poems, Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony).
Noted authority on Yemeni music Nizar Ghanem discussed Sounds of Other Shores during an extended interview on Yemen Today TV.
The full segment (in Arabic) can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/w2_8uVOYXXM?si=W6QUcA2cFWkXpP8v
Professor Byron Dueck, outgoing Chair of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, offered insightful and heartfelt reflections on Sounds of Other Shores at the joint BFE-ICTMD Ireland conference in Cork, Ireland, April 4, 2024. He began:
"I urge you to…read this wonderful book, whose contributions include a compelling ethnography of the music of the Swahili-speaking Muslims of Kenya; an extension of a growing literature on music of the Indian Ocean; an expansion of ethnomusicology’s engagement with legacies of Jakobson and Bakhtin; an ethnographically informed, hermeneutic approach to hybridization; and a welcome new framing of the concept of appropriation…"
See Professor Dueck’s full response to the book here.
Earlier this month, Andrew Eisenberg discussed Sounds of Other Shores at a presentation at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute in New York (19 Washington Square North). The event, titled "Boom.Diwan: Musical Cosmopolitanism from the Arabian Gulf to the Swahili Coast," also featured fellow NYU Abu Dhabi ethnomusicologist Ghazi Al Mulaifi and the drummers of his Kuwaiti neotraditional ensemble Boom.Diwan (video here).