Listen to an excerpt of Professor Kapchan’s sound project in Fårö, Sweden in which she explains how sound affects us, how it vibrates the environment and why ways of listening are connected to feelings of home.
Poetic Justice
Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The project started in1994 when Professor Kapchan was residing in Rabat and attended a festival of zajal – Moroccan poetry in dialect – where two celebrated poets, Ahmed Lemsyeh and Driss Mesnaoui, were reciting their works. Impressed with their oeuvre, Kapchan began translating their work into English.
Traveling Spirit Masters
Moroccan Trance Music in the Global Marketplace
Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed with music and trance. As a group of ritual musicians originally from sub-Saharan Africa, the Gnawa have been living in Morocco for centuries and have long participated in the world music market. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Gender on the Market
This book is the result of extensive ethnographic research on Moroccan women’s expressive culture and the ways in which it both determines and responds to current transformations in gender roles. Beginning with women’s emergence into what has been defined as the most paradigmatic of Moroccan male institutions—the marketplace—the book elucidates how gender and commodity relations are experienced and interpreted in women’s aesthetic practices.
Theorizing Sound Writing (Edited)
This volume contains an impressive lineup of scholars from anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance, and sound studies. More
The Aesthetics of Proximity
Watch Professor Kapchan’s presentation on the “auditory sublime” at Phenomenology in Ethnomusicology
Conference at Memorial University of Newfoundland in June 2018. In the presentation she describes the sublime both an aesthetic category that structures philosophical thinking as well as a structuring affect – something that co-creates human sociality, like mourning, anger, or effervescence. More on the media page
Cultural Heritage in Transit (Edited)
This volume examines the intangibilities of human rights in the realm of heritage production, focusing on the ephemeral culture of those who perform it as well as the ambiguities present in the idea of cultural property. More
Art of Maghreb
Having met many artists over her decades of fieldwork in Morocco, Professor Kapchan has dedicated a space on her portal to promote the work of Moroccan painters.
Painting by Rachida Madani