From the Editor

This issue of Ethnomusicology opens with three essays that explore how diaspora and identity are intertwined with sound and music from three distinctly different vantage points and with three distinct methodologies. In the opening essay, “Researching Cuban Drag, or Queer Diasporic Ethnography and Ethnomusicology,” M. Myrta Leslie Santana traces the legacy of drag performers in the Cuban diaspora and a genealogy of queer diasporic ethnography that has implications for all ethnomusicologists researching diasporic communities. Yun Emily Wang explores the ways that different intersecting identities—age, class, ethnicity, gender, migration experiences—are sounded out in sometimes contentious ways through mundane activities in “Shopping and Chopping: How Everyday Sounds Come Alive in Sinophone Toronto.” Wang invites the reader to listen to familiar soundscapes—muzak in shopping malls, a knife on a chopping block—through the ears of Sinophone residents of the Greater Toronto Area as they navigate their lives in communities shaped by an ideology of Canadian multiculturalism. It's not just the taste of the food that feeds their identities, but a sensorium that includes the sound of shopping, preparing, and eating meals. An earlier version of this paper, presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, won the Charles Seeger Prize for most distinguished student paper. In “The Fluid Diaspora: Palestinian Composers and the Diasporic Experience,” Loab Hammoud explores identity and diaspora through a historical lens as he provides a close study of two Palestinian musicians, Rawhi al-Khammāsh and Riyad al-Bandak, who were displaced to neighboring countries following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Hammoud reconstructs these musicians’ biographies through archival materials, interviews with their descendants and former students, and the musical works they created. Through these case studies, Hammoud argues for a more expansive view of diaspora. Hammoud argues that Palestinians, particularly those who settled in neighboring countries, where they shared language, religious, and often broad cultural practices, have often been viewed as dispersed, but not diasporic by key scholars of diaspora studies. He contends that the concept of a “fluid diaspora” accommodates the ways individuals engage with adopted communities in profound ways through their artistic endeavors and what might be perceived as mobility masks precarity and deep longing for return.Giordano Marmone explores the ways in which Samburu communities in Kenya have adapted popular music and contemporary forms of media into traditional settings in “Performing Change and Preservation: How Pop Songs Became Ritual Music among the Pastoral Samburu of Kenya.” Marmone's interlocutors have generated new musical formations that weave together pastoralist rituals tied to age set and age class practices with international popular music that are shared in media formats easily transmitted through mobile phones. Marmone draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with Samburu communities to trace the ways that urban, educated Samburu, often marginalized within traditional cultural practices, have reconnected with their communities.The issue also includes, “‘Tell Me a Story’: Stories that Inform, Transform, and Guide,” a group of short essays first presented as the President's Round Table at the 2023 Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting. In this roundtable, past SEM president Tomie Hahn and her co-chair, Martin Daughtry, invited a group of scholars to tell a story about their work. These essays, in turn, invite their readers to consider how they might center storytelling in their work as ethnographers. For publication, the authors had an opportunity to revisit their remarks and reflect on their contributions, and they ask probing questions and provide inspiration for how other researchers might tell their own stories.This issue heralds the return of sound media reviews after a hiatus of several issues. If you have an interest in reviewing sound media, please contact sound media review Editor Morgan Luker. Likewise, our book review co-editors and film and multi-modal review editor are always seeking reviewers for a variety of recently published and distributed media of interest to ethnomusicologists. Please reach out to review editors—their contact information is listed on the inside cover of this issue and on the journal website.This issue also marks a bittersweet moment for the journal's editorial team. Assistant Editor Dr. Abby Rehard completed her PhD at Florida State University and is stepping down from the journal as she pursues her career. She has helped me in countless ways, and before I became editor, she assisted Frank Gunderson, too. I extend my appreciation for everything she has done for Ethnomusicology, and I wish her success in her future endeavors.I thank the many people who make each issue of the journal possible: the authors and their peer reviewers, review authors and review editors, the journal editorial board, the Society for Ethnomusicology Business Office staff and executive board, Kate Kemball at the University of Illinois Press, and assistant editor, Abby Rehard. Alan Burdette and Kurt Baer are steadfast in their support for the journal.As always, please submit your work to the journal and consider serving as a peer reviewer or writing a review if invited!

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