Sykes, Jim. 2018. The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Article Sidebar

PDF
Published Jan 27, 2021
DOI https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v107i.6663

Main Article Content

Davindar Singh
Harvard University

Abstract

-

Author Biography

Davindar Singh, Harvard University

Davindar Singh is a graduate student, Presidential Scholar, and Natterson-Horowitz Fellow at Harvard University. He studies representations of logistics, migration, and mobility in political discourse and Punjabi popular song. This research concentrates on musical depictions of Punjabis in South Asian and North American trucking industries, and the pathologization of these truckers by governments and public health NGOs for reasons including noise pollution and sexual immorality. Relationships between these musical and institutional discourses indicate the mutual constitution of regularities in cultural semiosis and regularities in global political economy. Singh specifically studies these regularities in the production and extractive circulation of spacetime and value in three overlapping sites: the logistics industry, the transnational class relationships it forms, and classed, gendered, and ethnicized models of personhood in Punjabi popular musical media that are shaped by logistics. He is outgoing co-chair of the Sound Studies Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and oversaw its conversion from SIG to Section. He is a student member of the SEM Council, Harvard's Graduate Student Council, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and the Society for Economic Anthropology. He used to be a saxophonist.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 107 (2020): Current Musicology, Fall 2020
Section
Book Reviews
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite
Singh, D. (2021). Sykes, Jim. 2018. The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Current Musicology, 107, 171–180. https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v107i.6663