Acoustemologies in Contact
Acoustemologies in Contact

Author: Emily Wilbourne

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1800640382

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In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.

American Contact
American Contact

Author:

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 151282576X

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A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas. American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible—or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible. In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America. Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O’Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

Cervantine Blackness
Cervantine Blackness

Author: Nicholas R. Jones

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-10-22

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0271099070

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There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.

Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence
Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence

Author: Emily Wilbourne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0197646913

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"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary performances and musical conventions, this book makes the forceful claim that operatic musical techniques were-from their very inception-imbricated with racialized differences. Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence offers both a macro and micro approach to its content. The first half of the volume draws upon a wide range of archival, theatrical and historical sources to articulate the theoretical interdependence of razza (lit. "race"), voice, and music in early modern Italy; the second half focuses on the life and work of a specific, racially-marked individual: the enslaved, Black, male soprano singer, Giovannino Buonaccorsi (fl. 1651-1674). Race, Voice, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Florence reframes the place of racial difference in Western art music and provides a compelling pre-history to later racial formulations of the sonic"--

Acoustemologies in Contact
Acoustemologies in Contact

Author: Emily Wilbourne

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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"In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence--from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment--this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of 'the canon' in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery."--Publisher's website

African Musicians in the Atlantic World
African Musicians in the Atlantic World

Author: Mary Caton Lingold

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-11-28

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0813949793

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Music, that fundamental form of human expression, is one of the most powerful cultural continuities fostered by enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. The roots of so much of the music beloved around the world today are drawn directly from the men and women carried across the Atlantic in chains, from the west coast of Africa to the shores of the so-called New World. This important new book bridges African diaspora studies, music studies, and transatlantic and colonial American literature to trace the lineage of African and African diasporic musical life in the early modern period. Mary Caton Lingold meticulously analyzes surviving sources, especially European travelogues, to recover the lives of African performers, the sounds they created, and the meaning their musical creations held in Africa and later for enslaved communities in the Caribbean and throughout the plantation Americas. The book provides a rich history of early African sound and a revelatory analysis of the many ways that music shaped enslavement and colonization in the Americas.

Ordinary Oralities
Ordinary Oralities

Author: Josephine Hoegaerts

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-08-07

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 3111079376

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Histories of voice are often written as accounts of greatness: great statesmen, notable rebels, grands discours, and famous exceptional speakers and singers populate our shelves. This focus on the great and exceptional has not only led to disproportionate attention to a small subset of historical actors (powerful, white, western men and the occasional token woman), but also obscures the broad range of vocal practices that have informed, co-created and given meaning to human lives and interactions in the past. For most historical actors, life did not consist of grand public speeches, but of private conversations, intimate whispers, hot gossip or interminable quarrels. This volume suggests an extended practice of eavesdropping: rather than listening out for exceptional voices, it listens in on the more mundane aspects of vocality, including speech and song, but also less formalized shouts, hisses, noises and silences. Ranging from the Scottish highlands to China, from the bedroom to the platform, and from the 18th until the 20th century, contributions to this volume seek out spaces and moments that have been documented idiosyncratically or with difficulty, and where the voice and its sounds can be of particular salience. In doing so, the volume argues for a heightened attention to who speaks, and whose voices resound in history, but refuses to take the modern equation between speech and presence/representation for granted.

Musical Migration and Imperial New York
Musical Migration and Imperial New York

Author: Brigid Cohen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-05-05

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0226818012

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"Through archival work and storytelling synthesis, Music Migration and Imperial New York revises, subverts, and supplements many inherited narratives about experimental music and arts in postwar New York into a sweeping new whole. From the urban street-level via music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book seeks to redraw the geographies of experimental art and so to reveal the imperial dynamics, as well as profoundly racialized and gendered power relations, that shaped and continue to shape the discourses and practices of modern music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years (ca. 1957 to 1963), Brigid Cohen's book encompasses a considerably wider range of people and practices than is usual in studies of the music of this period. It looks at a range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Varèse, Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity"--

Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film
Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film

Author: Sharon A. Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-05-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1527502112

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This is an edited volume of original essays which explore the meaning of bodies of water in creative narratives by African Americans. The contributors explore the representations of still and moving waterbodies across several genres of literature, film, and music. They also deploy socio-historical and environmental theories, in addition to close-reading interpretive strategies, all acknowledging and developing traditional ways of thinking about water in relation to African American experience and culture. The writers gathered here showcase insightful and vigorous research in various art forms, and, together, embody provocative, innovative and refreshing ways to contemplate water in Black American artistic expressivity.