Protests erupted throughout Iran in 2009 after incumbent Mahmood Ahmadinejad was declared winner of a highly disputed presidential race. The so-called “Green Wave” of protest included violent clashes with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the jailing of protesters and journalists, as well as injuries and casualties. Few foreign journalists were granted visas to enter the country, resulting in an information vacuum filled by so-called “citizen journalists” who uploaded cell-phone videos of and tweeted about the violent clashes. Alongside this emerged video chronicles of nightly chants by residents of Iran's densely populated cities shouting “Allah-O-Akbar” from their rooftops. By tracing the roots of this protest tradition, not only in the Iranian revolution of 1979 but also in Shi'a rowzeh khani performance, this essay examines rooftop chanting as an enactment of a counter-politics through sonic performativity. The threshold space of the rooftop figures here as a space of political improvisation.

Focusing on Kinship Records and the two years of ethnographic fieldwork I performed there, this essay develops the theory of the “aural imaginary” in an effort to deconstruct the centrality of racialized gender to the formation of the American world music culture industry. In doing so, I illuminate an aural imaginary particular to the production of a market for world music in the United States, suggesting ways to understand how this market is being consolidated, and considering some of the implications of its existence and functioning. While many studies of “world music” have focused on the construction of difference through the packaging of exoticized others for Western listeners, this essay explores “world music” as a construction of U.S. listening practices and sonic fantasy.

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