The sounds of decolonization: folk music and Arab nationalism in North Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1959, the American writer Paul Bowles began an ambitious project to document the folk music of Morocco. At roughly the same time, a Canadian ethnographer named Roxanne Carlisle started her own recording project in newly independent Sudan. Now held at the Library of Congress, the two archives resulting from these projects reflect the intertwined histories of Orientalism, Arabization, and indigenous resistance in the post-colonial period. Far from being the simple documents of folklore which their creators envisioned, they show how music became a key locus in the struggle between local artists at the periphery and officials at the centre to define the nation and its cultural identity. Caught in the middle of this discursive battle, Bowles and Carlisle applied their own Orientalist ideas to the music they encountered, resulting in recordings and representations far removed from the original social context of North African music. Attending to these conflicts around folk and popular music reveals the fraught, sometimes violent, cultural tensions of postcolonial nationalist projects which standard political histories often ignore.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".