Works

Academic Works

MA Paper: Musical Strategies for Negotiating Armenian-American Identity Formation

In this paper, I illustrate two related sides of 1950s and 60s East Coast Armenian-American music. The first side is music made for and performed by Armenians at community events such as picnics, weddings and communal dance parties. The second is the music made by Armenians in collaboration with other diasporic groups for a wider American audience, crafted with economic vitality and marketability in mind, and performed at nightclubs and restaurants. These two sides employ different but interconnected strategies of negotiating Armenian identity formation: one that is more inward-facing and prioritizes community building amongst Armenians, and one that is outward-facing and navigates self-representations and understandings in relation to larger racialization and ethnic identity building processes in the US. Ultimately, I argue that these two interconnected musical strategies are employed to negotiate conceptions of Armenian identities in order to further crystallize understandings of their own diasporic positionalities.

Senior Thesis: Constructions and Representations of the Middle East in Post-9/11 Pop and Hip-Hop Music

In this thesis, I explore constructions and representations of the Middle East in post-9/11 pop and hip-hop music. Through using musical exoticism and Orientalism as my theoretical framework, I examine the social and historical contexts that allow US audiences to hear the Middle East within these tracks. Ultimately, I argue that sonic representations of the Middle East in post-9/11 popular music goes beyond the confines of the songs and allows the entrance of existing modes of representing the Middle East and Middle Easterners. These representations, which I call the Sonic Middle East, are built on the musical negotiation of two historically opposing identities, the US and the Middle East, and are brought forth through different dualities and dichotomies. The Sonic Middle East adds to the body of representations of the Middle East in the post-9/11 world that are informed by western fears, desires, and global aspirations.