Sound at ASA 2010

Normally you would see a brand-new post from Sounding Out! on a Monday like this one, but this week I am traveling to the American Studies Association Conference in San Antonio, Texas, where I will be speaking on what promises to be an excellent sound studies roundtable on Thursday morning. I am excited to be part of a growing sound studies presence at ASA and I would love to facilitate an even larger auditory footprint. So as to bring the conference experience a little closer to those that cannot be down in TX, I will be. . .

A) posting my opening gambit to my roundtable “Huhh!..Hahh!..Huhh!..Hahh!..: Sound, Working, Chain” Thursday evening and welcoming your thoughts and responses

B) Tweeting real-time sound-related thoughts and ideas inspired by the panels I attend at our twitterfeed: http://twitter.com/soundingoutblog; follow us for the scoop!

& C) Listing all of the sound related panels below–which are full of lovely hotlinks to full abstracts. If you are planning to attend ASA, please come give these folks a listen. If you can’t make it, participate via Sounding Out!

See you Thursday! If I somehow missed you, please let me know!: jsa@binghamton.edu

 

Access the full searchable program here: This years’s theme is “Crisis, Chains, and Change.”

Thursday, 11/18

 

 

 

 

 

 

• “Huhh!..Hahh!..Huhh!..Hahh!..: Sound, Working, Chain”

 

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 206B

Chair: Bryan Wagner (University of California, Berkeley (CA))

Panelist: Roshanak Kheshti (University of California, San Diego (CA))

Panelist: Shana Redmond (University of Southern California (CA))

Panelist: Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College in Pennsylvania (PA))

Panelist: Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (State University of New York, Binghamton (NY)

Panelist: Tara Rodgers (McGill University)

Abstract:

In his hit song “Chain Gang” sledge hammer clangs against railroad tie as Sam Cooke’s honey-dipped voice narrates a sonic scene in which men “moanin’ their lives away” lose themselves in a choral anguish, each grunt metronomically marking the passage of servile time, their spirits carried off to an imagined homeland inhabited by loved ones, a place of possibility and hope. “Give me water, I’m thirsty, my work is so hard” the collective body reveals a fundamental yearning for a material and spiritual quenching that is not yet. Riding the refrain “Huhh!..Hahh!..Huhh!..Hahh!,” the working men carry on in a sonic meditation, hovering just above their toiling bodies in sound worlds of redemptive, libratory possibility.

Cooke’s evocative lyrics and guttural howls along with his bands rhythmic precision set to record in an RCA studio by Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore’s production skills represents a synergy of sonic performances and events. This panel brings together scholars working on similar synergies in which sound reaches just beyond its boundaries exceeding its perceptual mode to create contact with other worlds, times, places and possibilities. Whether in the context of commodity chains, chains of signification, busking for change or disruptions to the chain of command, sound can function as medium, message, massage, weapon, prison and fantasy. This panel explores the poetics of sound, examining its capacity as a vehicle of time travel, distraction, alarm, liberation, restraint and pleasure.

• Sounds of Criminality / Criminality of Sound

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 4:00pm – 5:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214C

Licensed Begging: Mayor La Guardia’s Street Music Ban and Noise Abatement as Labor Surveillance: Robert Hawkins (Saint Louis University (MO))

A Short History of American Wiretapping: David Suisman (University of Delaware (DE))

Anarchy in the U.S.A.: Immigrant Punk, Hybridity and the Incarceral Politics of American National Identity: Megan Turner (University of California, San Diego (CA))

Double Voices of Musical Censorship: Martin Scherzinger (New York University (NY))

• Rock Music and the Politics of Cultural Belonging

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 4:00pm – 5:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B

Chair: Barry Shank (Ohio State University, Columbus (OH))

Paisagem Útil : Modernity and the Nation in Brazilian Popular Song: Brendan McGillicuddy (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN))

The Punk Event: The CBGB’s Scene and Avant-Garde Aesthetics: Shaun Cullen (University of Virginia (VA))

Can’t Quit Your Day Job: The Liminal Space of the Semiprofessional Musician: Colin Helb (Elizabethtown College (PA))

Comment: Barry Shank (Ohio State University, Columbus (OH))

Friday, 11.19

 

• Waking Up to the Expressive Sounds of Racial Conflict and Confinement

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 201

Chair: Ben V. Olguin (University of Texas, San Antonio (TX))

The Sounds of Shackles: African American Work Songs on Texas Prison Farms : James Deutsch (Smithsonian Institution)

Promises, Problems, and Cultural Crises: The Reverberating Sounds from Gideon v. Wainwright: Mary Seliger (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA))

Radio Raheem’s Broken Boom-Box: Artistic and Musical Responses to Police Brutality and Racial Violence: Johanna Almiron (University of Hawaii, Manoa (HI)

Comment: Ben V. Olguin (University of Texas, San Antonio (TX))

• Musical Formations

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214C

 

Chair: Ulrich Adelt (University of Wyoming (WY))

The Ethical Vision of “el Adios Tejas” in El Corrido Pensilvanio Jaime Javier Rodriguez (University of North Texas (TX))

Making Face, Making Space: The Aesthetics of Brown Identity in Jim Mendiola’s Girl In A Coma Universe Alexandra Mendoza Covarrubias (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN))

Asian American Hip Hop and the Inter-national Christopher Ramos (University of Florida (FL))

Comment: Alexandra Vazquez (Princeton University (NJ))

• Sonic Junctures: Socio-spatiality, Music, and Sexuality

 

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 12:00pm – 1:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 206A

Chair: Lawrence La Fountain Stokes (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI))

Sonic Crisis: Girl in a Coma: Deborah R. Vargas (University of California, Irvine (CA))

Si tú creías que yo no venía: NuYoRico, Salsa, and Puerto Rican “National” Culture: Marisol Negrón (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Censúrarme: Underground Rap and Neoliberal Policing in Puerto Rico: Marisol LeBrón (New York University (NY))

Sexing the Game: Black Women and the Sexual Politics of Hip-Hop Pornography:Mireille Miller-Young (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA))

Comment: Lawrence La Fountain Stokes (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI))

• Sonic Disseminations

 

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 2:00pm – 3:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 203B

Chair: Aaron Lecklider (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Jazz Subjectivities in Neoliberal Culture: Dale Edward Chapman (Bates College (ME)

Where’s the Gig At?: Taking Missions and Creating Space with Punk Rock on the Greater Eastside: Jonathan Daniel Gomez (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)

Comment: Aaron Lecklider (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Saturday, 11.20

• Thoroughly Black? The Jazz Image and Racial Imaginaries

Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 207A

 

Chair: Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas (KS))

Fine Art/Black Art: Roy DeCarava and the Jazz Image: Benjamin Cawthra (California State University, Fullerton (CA))

Monterey and Ray: The Impact of the Jazz Image on American Consumerism: Heather Pinson (Robert Morris College (PA))

Impressions of America in the Tropics: Jazz, Creolization, and the Racial Imagination: Jerome Camal (Washington University in St. Louis (MO))

Comment: Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas (KS))

Sound-Related Individual Papers:

• The Aural Border Patrol?: Migracorridos, Movidas, and Migrant Subjectivity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Israel Pastrana, University of California, San Diego (CA), Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 8:00am – 9:45am Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B, In Session “Negotiating Nationalisms in Popular Culture”
• Embodying Collapse, Performing Change: Of Tango and Jazz as “Effects”, Marcela Fuentes, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 10:00am – 11:45am, Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B, part of panel, “In the Event of Emergence: Revolutionary Politics and the Hemispheric Crisis State”
• Jews, Catholics, and the Color Line in Jazz Age Houston, Tyina Steptoe, University of Washington, Seattle (WA), Scheduled Time: Sun, Nov 21 – 8:00am – 9:45am Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 207B, In Session “Internationalism in the Americas”
• The Sound of Authority: Aural Observation and Hallucinatory Culture at the Government Hospital for the Insane, 1895-1905: Kathleen Brian (George Washington University (DC)), Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 2:00pm – 3:45pm Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214D in session, “ASA Students’ Committee. Spotlight on Student ASA Regional Award Winners”

Receptions:

Journal of Popular Music Studies | JPMS

Friday, November 19 · 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location Zinc Bar and Bistro (in the Charles Courtyard)

207 N. Presa, San Antonio, TX

Come meet the new editorial team of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and learn more about JPMS. Gnosh, drink, mingle, debate the merits of “Like a G6.”

Editors in Chief:Gustavus Stadler (Haverford) and Karen Tongson (USC)
Associate Editors: Anthony Kwame Harrison (Virginia Tech)Wayne Marshall (M.I.T.)David Suisman (U of Delaware) | book reviewsAlexandra Vazquez (Princeton) | performance reviews Eric Weisbard (U of Alabama)Mina Yang (USC)

SnacksOpen bar for the first hour (or until our tab is full) and cash bar. Good Company!