2025 Theses Doctoral

Listening for Bilad al-Shām in São Paulo: Expressions of “Baladī Belonging” through Music and Sound

Cossermelli Messina, Paola

This ethnographic and archival project explores expressions of belonging through music, sound, and memory, particularly among Mashriqī (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian) women in São Paulo, Brazil. Through semi-structured interviews and analyses of folk and contemporary musics, I identify the sentiment of “baladī belonging.” Stemming from balad (“country”), baladī (lit. “my country”) is a word in Arabic that indicates an object, value, or person is part of an indigenous heritage and is not foreign. Transposed to the Brazilian context, I argue that “baladī belonging” permeates the expressions of my Mashriqī interlocutors, challenging nationalist narratives which heterogenized a diverse and growing community.

My focus on the voices of women counters patriarchal narratives that have dictated the content and contours of the archive on the Mashriqī community in São Paulo. Unlike nationalism, which is structured by voices with political and financial power, baladī belonging-geographically rooted in villages rather than bordered nation-states-is articulated via cultural heirlooms expressed and preserved largely by women. In my work, I look at how fragments of language, memory, and sound reaffirm the notion of belonging through trauma, erasure, and displacement.