Currents in Popular Music: Race & Sound

Catalog description

Race and sound have a material relationship marked by imagination, fantasy, and deceit. Race is both social construct and lived reality; it changes across time, space, and modes of expression. Music, (or here, sound), can both express creative insurgency and reproduce cultural hegemony. In this seminar, we will read for the duality of racing sound – declaring particular racial identities at particular times by ascribing those identities to sonic markers – and sounding race; making racial identity audible through listening and performance practices. We will also engage contemporary discourses of popular music and sound studies by reading popular music books published in the last 5 years. By focusing on the ways that these texts are constructed and examining continuities and disjunctions across monographs, we’ll work to understand the current landscape of popular music studies and enter into that discourse ourselves.