This paper surveys a collection of music-related interactions, sanctions, circumstances and figures that embodies the spirit of diplomacy and defiance in the Horn of Africa during the twentieth century. The research will examine historic moments of goodwill, propagation, ingenuity and activism that altered the course of modern music culture in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, where government officials, cultural ambassadors and, most significantly, musicians wield their authority, influence, popularity, instruments and voices beyond the traditional norms of their enterprise. Along these lines, the paper will discuss the expansive concept of jazz as symbolically appropriated and re-purposed by the performing artist and diplomat associated with the region. Although far from being exhaustive, this work engages with musical activity as a vehicle for information, identity, nationalism and broad meaning.

As a window into what happens when anthropology’s published and unpublished writing forms are measured together, this thesis will review the personal correspondence of a mid-twentieth century American anthropologist, David Montgomery Hart, whose letters, totaling over 10,000 pages, were recently entrusted to the National Archives in Morocco. In particular, I highlight what the discussions that occurred in his letters reflect about racialized logics in academic research at the time, collaborations between anthropologists and colonial officials, as well as the dangers Indigenous field assistants could face as a result of their work. Throughout my thesis, I will suggest how conceptualizations of race, particularly notions of whiteness as articulated in Euro-American writing from the nineteenth century forward, have shaped the field of Amazigh studies, as other scholars have noted. In combining analysis of Hart’s publications, personal correspondences, and my own interviews with his colleagues, I have two goals: first, to outline the processes by which twentieth-century anthropological research contributed to marking difference on a black-and-white color line in the region; and second, to suggest that ongoing discussions on the role of reflexivity in anthropology consider the importance of the discipline’s inward- as well as outward-facing writing.

This dissertation is grounded in twenty months of ethnographic research conducted during the touristic development of the centro storico, or historical center, of Palermo, Sicily. It investigates the effects of this development on the everyday experiences of residents – including migrants and locals – and examines how urban requalification and tourism are unsettling the sociospatial order of the city and disrupting the politics of belonging. Each chapter of this dissertation explores how the large-scale phenomena now defining Mediterranean cities – economic restructuring, international tourism, and the so-called “crisis” of immigration – are experienced in the microcosm of the everyday. This dissertation demonstrates how, in the midst of liberal development in Palermo, the racialized figures of the migrant and the poor southerner emerge more clearly than ever before. It ultimately argues that Palermo emerges as a battlefield defining the future of Mediterranean cities. Palermo is a historically poor and working-class city, held tightly under mafia control until the late 1990s. Since the 2010s, it has also become a migrant city: in its centro storico, migrants are highly visible and share the same dilapidated neighborhoods that unofficially belong to the local underclasses. But the recent funneling of structural funds into the city for tourist development – and the ensuing changes to the urban environment and the sociospatial order – heightens the stakes for belonging. Official discourse is positioning Palermo as a city emerging from the clutches of the past, catapulting towards a future of ‘smart,’ sustainable development, and as a cosmopolitan “citt� aperta” (open city) for migrants. This dissertation documents how liberal development strategies are moving the local poor and migrants out of the city. It shows how the regeneration agenda became, along with tourism, the main response to the Eurozone crisis and the so-called Southern Question, or southern Italian underdevelopment. Drawing from walk-along interviews with ‘locals’ and ‘migrants,’ and following guided tours of the city, this dissertation examines the everyday experiences of tourist development from a variety of angles.