Affective temporalities of presence and absence: musical haunting and embodied political histories in an Algerian religious community

ABSTRACT What does it mean to be musically haunted? In the Algerian popular Islamic ritual called dīwān, one can be haunted by the deep, bass-register melodies of spirits, saints and historical figures of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Musical haunting is affective haunting. Melodies are not only felt emotionally as recurrent fear, dread and ambiguous loss (Boss 1999. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.) but they are also simultaneously physically arresting for the body and senses, erupting into uncomfortable sensations like prickling skin and knots in the stomach, eventually precipitating into registers of trance. Here, musical affects manifest spectrally – both directly as non-human entities or spirits and indirectly through strong emotions that tend to ‘take over’. The haunted are never eventually ‘healed’ in ritual, in the sense of completion; suffering always comes back in some form. Rather, dīwān is a modality of continually inhabiting and embodying various tumultuous, political histories perpetually resounding through the daily lives and physical bodies of the dīwān community. By way of non-Western understandings of affect, music, and ritualised temporality, this essay illustrates an intertwined, spectral interdependency of music, affect and politics.