CUSAS Book Talk and Discussion

in conversation with Professor Angela Impey, Professor Martin Stokes and Dr Perveez Mody

Please join us for a book talk with author Dr Christina Woolner (SocAnth, Cambridge) who will speak about her recently published book Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland (Chicago), which provides an ethnographic account of the social and political lives of love songs in Somaliland. The talk will be followed by a panel discussion with Professor Angela Impey (Music, SOAS), Professor Martin Stokes (Music, King’s College London) and Dr Perveez Mody (SocAnth, Cambridge), and chaired by Dr Timothy Cooper (SocAnth, Cambridge). The panelists will each speak to how the book interests with their own research. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session, and drinks in King’s bar for those who wish to join. 

More information about the book is available here, or on the book’s companion website: lovesongs.christinawoolner.com

Questions about the event can be directed to Christina (cjw204@cam.ac.uk).

About the book:

An intimate account of everyday life in Somaliland, explored through an ever-evolving musical genre of love songs.

At first listen, both music and talk about love are conspicuously absent from Somaliland’s public soundscapes. The lingering effects of war, the contested place of music in Islam, and gendered norms of emotional expression limit opportunities for making music and sharing personal feelings. But while Christina J. Woolner was researching peacebuilding in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa, she kept hearing snippets of songs. Almost all of these, she learned, were about love. In these songs, poets, musicians, and singers collaborate to give voice to personal love aspirations and often painful experiences of love-suffering. Once in circulation, the intimate and heartfelt voices of love songs provide rare and deeply therapeutic opportunities for dareen-wadaag (feeling-sharing). In a region of political instability, these songs also work to powerfully unite listeners on the basis of shared vulnerability, transcending social and political divisions and opening space for a different kind of politics.

Taking us from 1950s recordings preserved on dusty cassettes to new releases on YouTube and live performances at Somaliland’s first postwar music venue—where the author herself eventually takes the stage—Woolner offers an account of love songs in motion that reveals the capacity of music to connect people and feelings across time and space, creating new possibilities for relating to oneself and others.