Attuning Through Devotional Sounds: Ginan Recitation and Minoritarian World-Making in North America

ABSTRACT How does devotional sound shape religious life in minoritized communities, and what forms of ethical and political imagination does it make possible? This article examines these questions through Shia Ismaili Muslims in North America and their recitation of ginans—devotional compositions attributed to satpanthi preacher-poets (pirs) and performed for centuries in South Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and close listening, I argue that ginan recitation functions as a minoritarian aesthetic practice that reorganizes temporal, sensory, and ethical experience. Following Hentyle Yapp’s formulation of “minor as method,” I use minoritarian not to denote smallness but to foreground modes of living and sensing rendered invisible by majoritarian value regimes. Reciting ginans enables migrants and their children to inhabit layered worlds and cycles of time, mend ruptures produced by displacement and racialized precarity, and cultivate belonging beyond nation-centered narratives. Attending to performances in jamatkhanas, community gatherings, and digital and artistic remediations, the article traces how reciters and listeners orient themselves through melody, bodily comportment, and motifs about the soul’s journey, divine presence, and ethical responsibility. By foregrounding the sonic, affective, and reparative possibilities of ginans, the article contributes to broader conversations about aesthetics, religioning, and the formation of minoritized publics across religious traditions.