The Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is pleased to announce a public colloquium talk featuring Dr. Nour El Rayes (Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University).
Dr. El Rayes's talk is titled "Belligerent optimism: alternative music and the labor of futurity in postwars Lebanon."
Thursday February 19, 2026 4:30PM
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology), 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Contact [email protected] for more information or specific accommodations
Abstract: This talk examines how alternative music in post–civil wars Lebanon makes audible futures beyond dominant narratives of violence, precarity, and inevitable collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut (2013–2019), I consider how artists confront entrenched instability while insisting on the possibility of life within and beyond it. Against academic, journalistic, and policy discourses that frame Lebanon as trapped in perpetual disaster, these musicians do more than express melancholy or protest. Their sounds articulate a mode of living and imagining that is irreverent, combative, joyful, and oriented toward futurity. Belligerent optimism names this orientation: a stance that confronts the weight of history while refusing both resignation and naïve hope, making optimism itself a labor of persistence rather than a promise of the “good life.”
In practice, this orientation shapes how musicians compose, perform, and inhabit the world. It is visible in the interplay of wit, sarcasm, and dark humor with political and social critique, in moments of exuberance that insist on life even in contexts of precarity, and in performances that call attention to the possibilities embedded in everyday survival. These sounds make audible the ongoing work of living, imagining, and creating futures that persist despite instability and uncertainty.
Bio: Nour El Rayes is an ethnomusicologist specializing in global popular musics. Her work engages questions about temporality, performance, and sound in the context of decolonial modes of self-determination. El Rayes’ current research project, an ethnography of alternative music in Lebanon, explores how music is entangled in the project of realizing particular aspirations or hopes for collective futures. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology with a designated emphasis in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
