The sounds of Kabul : radio and the politics of popular culture in Afghanistan, 1960-79
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The Sounds of Kabul is an in-depth analysis of radio and popular culture in modern Afghanistan. As the first historical study of Afghanistan to use archives of sound, this dissertation employs literature, poetry, and song to uncover thousands of years of shared textual history and cultural memory across Central and South Asia, and the broader Islamic World. Over the course of six chapters covering the introduction of radio broadcasting, transnational cultural collaborations in music and the performing arts, cassettes and the global circulation of sound, the biography of the iconic Afghan pop-star, Ahmad Zahir, who used music to challenge cultural norms and hegemonic social structures, acclaimed literature and poetry programs created by Afghan women, and the merger of radio and television that further popularized regional music, this interdisciplinary study places sound and mass media and their diverse interlocutors in direct conversation with broader social, cultural, and political developments unfolding primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, a wide array of elite and ordinary actors including musicians, artists, performers, and cultural producers surface in the following chapters and contribute to a new sonic approach that captures the visceral experience of daily life in the region. Resonant with Afghanistan's transregional pasts and transnational presents through a diaspora that is both global and multilingual, this dissertation draws on self-conducted oral histories and archives from around the world in multiple languages—Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Tajiki, Urdu and English—housed in Afghanistan, India, Great Britain, France, Tajikistan and the United States. At the foundation of these archives are primary audio, visual, and textual sources, which, along with other untapped materials, broaden the methodological horizons of scholarship on Afghanistan and its surrounding regions, and elucidate what the study of radio and sound may teach us about a society's extraordinary past.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Massoumi, Mejgan |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Cabrita, Joel, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Degree committee member | Cabrita, Joel, 1980- |
| Degree committee member | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mejgan Massoumi. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rq121hk2353 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Mejgan Massoumi
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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