Sources we've worked from.

Four chapters on Moroccan men's rural music and poetry, the gendered category l-'arubiya, and how migrant performers in Italy voice their longing for Morocco through this repertoire. Of indirect interest to the Gnawa project — illuminates the broader Moroccan musical landscape and the same festival-economy / authenticity questions Witulski poses for the Gnawa.

Field-based study built from Becker's annual Essaouira fieldwork since 1997 (year-round since 2006). The book reads Gnawa identity as a patchwork — explicitly modeled on the Bu Derbala/Buderbala spirit's multicoloured costume — that absorbs people from many ethnic origins into a shared Black identity. Becker's gateway was Khamlia, a remote southeastern town inhabited by the Ismkhan ('slaves'), descendants of enslaved people aligned with the Aït Khabbash Amazigh; locals there pointed her to Mahmoud Guinia in Essaouira. The Acknowledgements name the Gania family across three generations — first-hand contact that grounds the book's claims. Beyond the visual archive, Becker sets the music alongside late-19th- and 20th-century photographs, postcards, dress, and ritual objects to track how Gnawa identity was constructed both from within and from without — and argues that what looks today like 'tradition' is the survival of a heritage actively suppressed and selectively reframed.

Nine chapters tracking how Fez Gnawa maâlems negotiate the demands placed on them by tourism, festivals, and global recognition. Witulski's central concern is authenticity-as-claim — how Gnawa practitioners assert ritual authority when festival economies redirect their music towards entertainment. Chapter 3 (African Routes and Sufi Roots) lays out the dual-origin framing; Chapter 6 (Light Rhythms and Heavy Spirits) and Chapter 7 (Fighting New Demands) develop the festival-economy critique. Three of nine chapters had prior journal publication (Ch. 4 in JNAS 2016a, Ch. 6 in Ethnomusicology Forum 2016b, Ch. 7 in Ethnomusicology 2018).

Eight chapters across two parts. Part One reads slavery, race and concubinage through the Islamic discourse — Qur'an, Hadith, Maliki legal practice. Part Two follows the internal African diaspora into Morocco: the trans-Saharan trade routes, Mawlay Isma'il's racialised 'Abid al-Bukhari project (1672), the political career of the Black Army, the abolition, and (Ch. 8) the Gnawa as the surviving mystic order. El Hamel resolves the long-running debate on the etymology of 'Gnawa': it is most likely from the Berber word gnawi (black man) attested from at least the 1140s (az-Zuhri), not from medieval Ghana (Pâques). The 1130 Almoravid battle of Aghmat — where 3,000 'Jnawa' soldiers were killed — pushes the institutional Black-African presence in Morocco to the 12th century, well before the Songhai (1591) or 'Abid al-Bukhari (1672) milestones.

Kapchan, a folklorist and performance-studies scholar, draws on more than twenty years of participation in lila ceremonies and travel with maâlems on the world-music circuit. The book is at its strongest on the *body* — gesture, breath, the sensorium of the trance state — and on the cross-Atlantic collaborations (with African-American jazz musicians, French electronic producers) that have shaped Gnawa's global voice without simply secularising it. Kapchan reads the festival economy as a cultural marketplace where trance is repackaged, but argues the practice has been adapting to new audiences for far longer than that frame suggests.

Edited by Moroccan scholar Abdelhafid Chlyeh. Gathers chapters from Antonio Baldassarre, Chlyeh himself, Mohamed Mahdi, Hassan Amraoui and others. The acknowledgements name André Azoulay (counsellor to King Hassan II and architect of the Essaouira festival), ambassadors Herwig Bartels and Lucio Guerrato, and the Essaouira municipality — locating the volume as part of the late-1990s state-supported revaluation of Gnawa music. Baldassarre's chapter 'Musique et danse des Gnawa: la lila/derdeba comme hypertexte' is the French companion to his 1986 Italian Culture Musicali essay, and adds an analytic frame (setting/dispositif, niya, feraja) the Italian original keeps implicit.

Eight chapters built from Chlyeh's fieldwork with Gnawa practitioners in Marrakech and Essaouira, initiated by the late Lala Zineb (a seer who brought Chlyeh into the research). Distinctive contribution: three chapters on the voyantes-thérapeutes — the women who organise and officiate the lila — a role the broader literature treats lightly. Includes a complete répertoire of the Gnawa song cycle (Annexe I) and a summary table of the sacred portion of the Lila de derdeba (Annexe II), plus cartographic annexes (Annexe III) of Gnawa locations.

Pâques (1920–2007) was a French anthropologist whose long career in West and North Africa produced this monograph alongside her wider work on the 'cosmic tree' as a structuring symbol across Saharan and sub-Saharan religious life. *La religion des esclaves* applies that symbolic-anthropology lens to the Gnawa: the guembri is not just an instrument but a 'companion', a 'living genie', the focal point of an ordered cosmology. Sum cites it for the ritual descriptions of how the guembri is consecrated, fed incense, sprinkled with milk and orange-water before each lila. Read with care — Pâques's interpretive ambition sometimes outruns the evidence she presents — but the descriptive material is rich and well-observed.

Five years of fieldwork with the Gania family of Essaouira (Maâlems Mahmoud, Mokhtar, and Abdallah, plus the moqaddema Zaida) yield a granular structural account of the lila and its repertoire. Sum documents the eight ritual suites and their succession, names every piece her teachers play, and gives each a Q-pattern, periodicity, and pitch-set analysis. Two figures are load-bearing for this site: Figure 4.4 (the cipher → string/position mapping that lets ciphers and tabs translate cleanly) and Figure 4.5 (three measured tunings of Maâlem Abdallah, with cents deviations from tempered pitch). The dissertation's larger argument is that contemporary Gnawa music is shaped by the tension between sacred lila practice and secular festival/touring contexts — a frame that names what the music is responding to without reducing it to either pole.

Fuson did long apprenticeships with Marrakech-school maâlems and writes from inside the practice. His dissertation analyses the lila as a continuous sequence of musical and ritual transformations across the night, where 'musicking moves' (the term he borrows from Christopher Small) and 'ritual grooves' co-produce the trance state. Sum's dissertation cross-references Fuson on essentially every contested term: she uses *oum* for the short ostinato motive while Fuson uses *mwima* (literally 'little mother'); she calls the krakeb patterns *Q1* and *Q2* while Fuson calls them the 4-stroke and 3-stroke patterns. Fuson is also the source for several footnoted observations about regional differences and the Hamdushiya borrowing that Sum develops further.

Aidi (Columbia, Institute of African Studies) reviews four recent books — Becker (Blackness in Morocco), Ciucci (The Voice of the Rural), El Hamel (Black Morocco), Witulski (The Gnawa Lions) — but the essay's intellectual scaffolding stands on its own as a survey of how Gnawa music has been theorised across the 20th and early 21st century. Useful for the project as both a finding aid (which books to acquire) and an editorial check: Aidi's warning that the contemporary categorising impulse (Black vs. Arab, Sufi vs. African, ritual vs. festival) continues colonial-era classificatory habits even when deployed to dignify Gnawa.

Spring 2019 fieldwork centred on Casablanca's walled medina and the 'Derb Gnawa' quarter where Gnawa houses concentrated from the 1930s onwards (the first crew arrived from Marrakech then). Portelli reads Casablanca's gentrification as a rewriting of the sacred geography of the city — corporate mega-projects branded as religious continuity (Trémie des Almohades named after a Berber dynasty, the underground megaphone Qur'an system) over a pre-existing pattern of vernacular shrines, qobbat, and Gnawa houses. The Gnawa appear repeatedly as both displaced from those spaces and contracted to bless the new ones — performing at the Marina Shopping Mall inauguration alongside acrobats and clowns. Names a Casablanca network (Hassan Sansi, Hassan Tiger, Mohamed Guchi) of practitioners we don't yet profile.

Three authors (Hanáková at Masaryk, Dobbelaere at Jean Monnet, Sechehaye at Université libre de Bruxelles) interview four m'allems in Brussels and players and a luthier in Marrakech and Rabat about the *sersera*, a removable idiophone made of metal loops fixed around the rim of a metal sheet that slides into a slot at the end of the guembri's neck. Acoustically, the sersera shimmers in the 1000–3000 Hz band the ear hears best, helping the lute cut through krakeb and singers — a 'cold' against the wood-and-skin 'warm', as Maâlem Rachid puts it. The paper documents that the device is now rarely mounted, even by makers who still build it, and gives the m'allems' own reasons: amplification has replaced its volume function, the krakeb cover its rhythm and metallic timbre, and outdoor secular performance contexts make it inaudible. The paper also gathers the symbolic readings — warm/cold complementarity, slave-chains, the three living kingdoms (animal/vegetal/mineral) — and traces the sersera back through Delacroix's 1832 sketches and Georg Høst's 1760 description from Essaouira.

Field-based study combining the Brussels Gnawa diaspora with interviews in Marrakech and Rabat. Documents the sersera (also called *risha* 'feather', or *sarsala* / *lisān* 'tongue') as a custom-made metallic timbre-modifier whose use is becoming obsolete. Compiles the historical evidence — Høst 1760, Delacroix 1832, Farmer 1928, Pâques 1991, Baldassarre 1999, Claisse 2003 — and situates the device within the West African plucked-lute tradition documented by Eric Charry. The article also gives the broadest published vocabulary for the guembri itself (wajh, awtar, mastara, l-fumm, makhzina, hmmal, itkellmu, hajhuj — the last confirming the instrument originally had two strings).

Autumn 2006 fieldwork during Sha'ban at Dar Gnawa in Tangier. Schaefer documents the contractual negotiation between a sick supplicant, a muqaddima, and the m'allem — Abdellah El Gourd — that gives the lila its economic shape. The article frames Gnawa healers as 'working-class entrepreneurs in a neo-liberal economy', following David Harvey's reading of capital. A 2010 return finds Dar Gnawa being formalised — board of directors, moving from Abdellah's home to a public space — as Tangier itself gentrifies around the Tanger-Med port redevelopment.

Italian-language ethnomusicology essay across the full Gnawa music system: brotherhood mythology (Sidna Bilal), trans-Saharan migration history (the 1591 fall of Songhai to Ahmed al-Mansour, Moulay Ismail's 'Abid al-Bukhari guard 1672–1727), the instruments (qraqèb, t'bal with sahla/tarrash stick taxonomy, gambri/hejhuj/dìn-dnà/santir), and the cosmology of the *khla* (the 'third hidden world') and the *mlouk*. Predates Sum 2012 by a generation and grounds her structural work with a wider ethnographic frame. Baldassarre is the same author behind the Al Sur 'Maîtres du Guembri Vol. IV' liner notes; the field connections to specific maâlems are first-hand. The French companion essay in Chlyeh 1999 ('Musique et danse des Gnawa: la lila/derdeba comme hypertexte') reframes the same material around setting/dispositif and the lila-as-hypertext.

Five months of fieldwork (2016–2017) with maâlems including Khalid Amenhouce (apprentice to the late Mahmoud Guinia), Yassine Boubker, and Azouz Soudani, plus the luthier Mahmoud. Vanelli measures the intervals from the dir tonic across all seven fingered positions on two instruments, giving the Gnawa scale a precise cents profile (Table 1). Two intervals — 163.9¢ at the dir's first position, 923.2¢ at the tehtia's second — sit between tempered scale steps and are not tuning errors: musicians reproduce them deliberately. Vanelli's broader argument is that these microtones function as identity markers tied to the brotherhood's West/Central African origins, and that they flatten to a tempered Dorian when commercial recordings (e.g. Hamid El Kasri's *Saha Koyo: Jazz Gnawa*, 2006) are forced to follow keyboard accompaniment.

58-minute documentary directed by Jacques Willemont under Viviana Pâques's scientific direction (Pâques died in 2007). Three content streams: interview footage with Al Ayachi (the moqqadem), documentary footage of a full derdeba, and Pâques's interpretive analysis derived from her decades of work at Tamesloht. Witulski's 2019 review for *Visual Anthropology* describes it as 'the fruit of the scientific approach Viviana Pâques inherited from the French symbolic school founded by Marcel Griaule in the 1950s'.

The fourth volume in Al Sur's Gnaoua Lila series, recorded with the two deans of Casablanca Gnawa — M'allem Sam (Mohammed Zourhbat) and M'allem Hmidah (Ahmed Boussou) — alternating leadership of the seven-suite ritual. The 35-page booklet, written by Baldassarre, gives bilingual transcriptions and translations of the song cycles for Bel Ahmar (the Red Lord — slaughterhouse / blood / Pacha Hammou) and Khder Chorfa (the Green of the Prophet's descendants), plus a single 'Samaoui' (Sky) song. The booklet also lays out the Casablanca-school's seven-station Tréq Beidaoui (path of the white) — distinct from the Saouiri 8-mhallat order Sum documents — and includes biographical sketches of Sam (b. Marrakech 1925) and Hmidah (b. Casablanca 1939), each with full apprenticeship lineage. The first source we have where the lyric and structural data are both vetted by a named scholar against named maâlems.