A new installment of the IMS’s provocative online publication is out! This contribution is part of the issue “Musicology’s Monumental Turns” (vol. 10, no. 1, 2026), which throughout the summer, will explore the global, auditory, and literary turns in the study of music and sound.

Imani Sanga, “Musical Sounds in Tanzanian Swahili Letters: Expanding Horizons of Musicology”
In my contribution to this “Musicological Brainfood” issue, I would like to make a few remarks concerning how music and sounds that we encounter in Tanzanian Swahili literary texts might expand our musicological horizons. To make these remarks, I take it to be self-evident that musicology, as we know it, has to be “provincialized,” to borrow a concept from Dipesh Chakrabarty, by acknowledging its Eurocentric or Western-centric locus and working towards “moving the centre from its location in Europe [and North America] towards a pluralism of centres, themselves being equally legitimate locations of human imagination,” to use Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s formulation. …