‎Music and Identity: African Musical Culture in Southwestern Pakistan‎

This chapter examines the historical presence and cultural legacy of communities of African descent in southwestern Pakistan and southeastern Iran, focusing in particular on the preservation of musical traditions associated with their ancestral homelands. Descendants of individuals who were brought from, or migrated from, various regions of Africa over the course of several centuries, these communities have largely lost explicit collective memory of their African origins. Nevertheless, while adopting local languages and integrating into surrounding ethnic and social formations, they have sustained distinctive musical repertoires, performance practices, and ritual expressions that attest to enduring African cultural continuities. The chapter further situates these traditions within a broader regional framework through a comparative analysis of musical practices among Afro-descendant communities in Pakistan and Iran, those in the Arabian Gulf, and other African diaspora populations across the wider Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern regions.