Orality Workshop with Anna Schultz (Stanford), "The Afterlives of Publishing: Christian Texts for Indian Jewish Song"

"When Bene Israel women perform Marathi Jewish songs, they sing from handwritten notebooks of song texts learned from mothers, aunts, and friends. These songs were transmitted orally and transcribed from memories of Jewish performance, but many have origins that are neither oral nor Jewish. Central to the repertories of Bene Israel women today are Psalms in Marathi meters, composed by Christian missionaries and published in the early nineteenth century. I will consider how Hindu devotional song practice colored these Christian texts, and how they have been re-oralized and re-textualized by Bene Israel women to bolster their Jewish knowledge, generate new forms of sociability, and articulate Bene Israel identities in changing contexts of nationalism and migration."Anna Schultz, assistant professor of ethnomusicology in Stanford's Department of Music, has conducted extensive ethnographic research in India. Her book Singing a Hindu Nation (Oxford University Press, 2013) is on the role of regional (Maharashtrian) performance idioms in the construction of religious nationalism in India.She has published and forthcoming articles and book chapters on the regional performance of Hindu nationalism, style and patronage in Marathi kirtan, aesthetics of suffering in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, mobile recording technology and ethnomusicological research, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and nostalgia and forgetting in the song "Kentucky."Anna's current research is on gender and minority identity in the paraliturgical music of the Bene Israel (Marathi-speaking Jews) of India and Israel.