Event overview
Dr Robin James will talk on the political stakes of theorizing with and through music, followed by a response by Professor Julian Henriques (Media and Communications)
This talk identifies two contrasting methods for theorizing with and through sound in contemporary scholarship. The first, philosophical approach updates the traditional "audiovisual litany", treating sound as overcoming the limitations of European post/modernity. This approach is found in neoliberal theories of society, and in feminist new materialism. The problem with this approach is that it only changes philosophy superficially--the shift from visual and verbal methods of abstraction to 'sonic' ones just updates the ways philosophy participates in historical relations of domination and subordination, such as racism and sexism. The second, phonographic approach, begins from the study of sonic practices in Afrodiasporic cultures. It doesn't posit an audiovisual litany, and instead aims to incorporate awareness of ongoing systemic domination into its analysis. Examples of phonographic analysis include Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye's analysis of the TR-808 and Ashon Crawley's study of the "choresosonics" of black pentecostal liturgy, which I will apply to a reading of Beyonce's "Hold Up".
Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of three books. The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance & post-identity biopolitics is under contract with Duke University Press. She also wrote Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism (Zero, 2015), and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Noisey, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Dec 2017 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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