Love Songs in Motion

Know about the book -

Love Songs in Motion is written by Christina J. Woolner and published by University of Chicago Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0226827399 (ISBN 10) and 9780226827391 (ISBN 13).

"At first listen, music is conspicuously absent from Somaliland's public soundscapes. The lingering effects of a war that devastated the artistic community and the increasing presence of Salafist groups, which see music as incompatible with Islamic principles, have muted musical practice. Nonetheless, as Christina Woolner undertook research in postwar peacebuilding in Somaliland's capital, Hargeysa, she continually heard snippets of songs. Many of these, she learned, were about love. In a time and region riddled with precarity, hees jacayl permits singers to "sing from the heart," a mode of voicing songs that Woolner calls envocalization, which allows the possibility of dareen-wadaang (feeling sharing). Despite their intense intimacy, that is, hees jacayl transcend the connection between the lover and the beloved, becoming also, perhaps paradoxically, an outward-facing, unifying force that powerfully draws together those "suffering" from love, poets, composers, singers, and listeners, in both private and public spaces. Taking us from 1950s recordings preserved on dusty cassettes to contemporary, often improvisatory performances in a scandalous venue where the author herself eventually performs, Woolner offers an understanding of love songs across time and space that opens new realms of possibility, for relating to others and for local reconciliation, which are otherwise closed off by overwhelming conditions of precarity"--