Transitions Chair at the Gnaoua Festival 2026

The Transitions Chair at IAS UM6P participates in the 27th Essaouira Gnaoua & World Music Festival with a dedicated intellectual programme titled Gnaoua between Singularity and Universality.

Fruit of the partnership between the Gnaoua and World Music Festival and University Mohammed VI Polytechnic through the Institute for Advanced Studies, this programme continues the Transitions Chair’s work on Gnaoua culture and its contemporary resonances. It approaches Gnaoua not only as a Moroccan heritage to preserve, but also as a living intellectual resource for thinking about transmission, identity, ritual, healing, memory, and cultural transformation.

Concept

Gnaoua culture is deeply rooted in a specific history, ritual practice, musical grammar, and spiritual cosmology, while carrying a resonance that reaches far beyond its immediate geographic and historical context. The programme asks how a tradition that is profoundly singular can become universally meaningful without losing its identity.

The two roundtables bring together scholars, artists, musicians, and practitioners to explore the circulation of Gnaoua culture across diasporas and the role of trance, ritual, and healing in contemporary societies.

Opening Keynote

From Singularity to Universality: Thinking Gnaoua Through the Lens of the Concrete Universal
Raphaël Liogier introduces the two conversations with a conceptual framework on the relationship between singularity and universality. The keynote considers how a tradition becomes universal not by dissolving its particularity, but by expressing something deeply human through its own singular form.

Programme

Saturday, 27 June 2026
Hôtel Atlas Essaouira Riad Resort, Salle La Caravelle, Essaouira

• 16:00-17:00 – Gnaoua in Diaspora: Origins, Inventions, Dispersions?
  This first roundtable examines diaspora as a space of circulation, reinterpretation, and renewal. It considers how Gnaoua identity and performance can be understood through comparison with African and African diasporic traditions, while avoiding reductive or externally imposed categories.
• 17:00-17:15 – Coffee break and musical interlude
  The musical interlude creates a transition not only in format, but also in experience, moving the audience from an intellectual conversation on diaspora and transmission toward a more embodied entry into the discussion on trance, ritual, and healing.
• 17:15-18:15 – Trance, Ritual, and Healing: Gnaoua and the Question of Ritualized States of Consciousness in Contemporary Societies
  This second roundtable focuses on the ritual and therapeutic dimensions of Gnaoua culture, with particular attention to trance, healing, altered states of consciousness, embodiment, and collective experience.
• 18:15-18:25 – Questions and answers

Roundtable Themes

Gnaoua in Diaspora

The first conversation asks what a diasporic perspective reveals about Gnaoua beyond national, folkloric, or heritage frameworks. It reflects on the promise and limits of comparison with other African and African diasporic traditions, and on how objects, instruments, ritual forms, and musical practices can carry memory, transmission, and relation.

Trance, Ritual, and Healing

The second conversation examines the lila as a ritual and healing process, the role of rhythm, colour, gesture, and invocation, and the broader question of why contemporary societies have often marginalized altered states of consciousness. Without romanticizing or flattening the complexity of Gnaoua practice, the discussion asks what Gnaoua can teach us about embodiment, care, collective healing, and the human need for ritual.

Participants

The programme brings together Raphaël Liogier, Mohamed Tozy, Hisham Aidi, Wendell Marsh, R. A. Judy, Kai Mora, Marouane Jaouat, Manoël Pénicaud, and Nathan Chapman Lean.

• Raphaël Liogier – Transitions Chair, IAS UM6P
• Wendell Marsh – UM6P
• R. A. Judy – University of Pittsburgh
• Marouane Jaouat – UM6P
• Manoël Pénicaud – CNRS, Rabat
• Nathan Chapman Lean – North Carolina State University

About the Transitions Chair

By extending the dialogue between academic knowledge, artistic creation, and lived experience, the Transitions Chair contributes to a deeper understanding of Gnaoua as a living heritage and as a source of reflection on the cultural, social, and human transformations shaping the contemporary world.