Sound at MLA 2012
Unlike MLA 2011 in Los Angeles, which overflowed with audio-themed research delights–see our last year’s round up here —MLA 2012 in Seattle seems, well, a lot less sonic. I have a few theories as to why this may be (and of course, I would love to hear your thoughts as to MLA’s relative silence in the comment section. Drop us a line!). First off, even in our networked universe, conferences always seem to take on some local flavor, so last year’s event in L.A., whose main industry continues to be entertainment, may have been a magnet for panels about music, sound, and other audio-visual inquiries. Without implying that sound studies is mutually exclusive with Digital Humanities–quite the opposite–perhaps the move to Seattle, long a technology hub thanks to Amazon.com and Microsoft, helps account for the veritable explosion of DH panels in the PMLA this year. Being the Editor-in-Chief of a blog, I have included some of the many excellent DH panels in this round up that I think are of interest to fellow research bloggers and sound studies peeps; see Professor (and ProfHacker) Mark Sample’s comprehensive Digital MLA listing on his blog Sample Reality for the full line up (and a great discussion of the growth of digital humanities as a field).
While the sharp decline in overtly labeled “sound studies” panels at MLA seems a bit troubling for a fledgling field, it could also be a backhanded marker of its growing success. As sound studies grows and expands into more academic venues, this extremely interdisciplinary field is becoming more diffuse and multivalent. 2011 marked the year that the American Studies Association hosted its first official meeting of the sound studies caucus, for example, and published a sound studies special issue of American Quarterly. Three years strong, the Sound Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies hosted a full slate of events and sound studies panels in New Orleans this past March. And the Sound Studies Special Interest Group at the Society for Ethnomusicology meeting this year in Philadelphia, two years old, did the same. Perhaps the time has come for us to coalesce at MLA in a similar way, forming a society with standing meetings and panels to ensure that the nexus of sound studies and literary inquiry continues to break new ground and thrive instead of waxing and waning along with the market and successive conference themes. Far from being antithetical or ancillary to studies of soundscapes, recordings, and other audible forms, language constructs and shapes our sensory experience of and the meanings we make from “actual” sound; we are only beginning to understand how.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps the way in which sound studies research has been absorbed into studies of literature and language is not so much a muting but rather a healthy sign of what audio engineers refer to as “bleed.” This year’s slate of panels shows how Sound Studies has proven undeniably useful to some of the core issues of the discipline: identity, translation, poetics, affect, tone, and especially voice. With the advent of sound studies, “voice” in literary study has ceased to be a solely a metaphor or an abstract symbol of agency, but panels like “Pinter’s Voice,” “Dissenting Voices,” and “Dickinson’s Fictions of Voice” suggest that the field now hears “voice” as a living, breathing, and sounding entity in its own right, a sensory element of literary craft bearing material traces (and social consequences–see “Gender and Voice: Orality, Dissent, and Community in the Late Middle Ages” and “Arabic Language and Identity: Transregional Texts and Transnational Discourse”).
Finally, I must mention that the MLA’s strength continues to be its international range; sound studies is frequently critiqued for a largely U.S. and British-based focus, so it is refreshing to see sound studies work from (and on) Germany, France, Australia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Ireland, and Iraq (among others) as well as inquiries that question the idea of borders and nation-states altogether. Whether revivifying the concept of voice or questioning the rhetorical construction of bodies and spaces across the globe, sound studies emerges as a critical mediator between sound and language at MLA 2012, a rich conversation that has really only just begun.
Please comment to let us know what you think–both before and after MLA 2012. If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: jsa@soundingoutblog.com
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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
Jump to THURSDAY, January 5
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THURSDAY, January 5
Thursday, 5 January
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8:30–11:30 a.m.
.1. Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates
Willow A, Sheraton
Presiding: Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.; Susan Schreibman, Trinity Coll. Dublin
The workshop will provide materials and facilitated discussion about evaluating work in digital media (e.g., scholarly editions, databases, digital mapping projects, born- digital creative or scholarly work). Designed for both creators of digital materials (candidates for tenure and promotion) and administrators or colleagues who evaluate those materials, the workshop will propose strategies for documenting, presenting, and evaluating such work.
Preregistration required.
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1:45–3:00 p.m.
.44. Pinter’s Voice
303, WSCC
Program arranged by the Harold Pinter Society. Presiding: Judith A. Roof, Rice Univ.
Saumya Rajan, Univ. of Allahabad, “Ruth: Harold Pinter’s Voice of Postmodernist Politics”
William Crooke, East Tennessee State Univ., “What Dyou Mean? The Cockney Voice in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,”
Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter Review, “Pinter’s Voices”
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1:45–3:00 p.m.
67. Race and Digital Humanities
611, WSCC
Program arranged by the Division on Black American Literature and Culture. Presiding: Howard Rambsy, Southern Illinois Univ.
Kimberly D. Blockett, Penn State Univ., Brandywine, “Digitizing the Past: The Technologies of Recovering Black Lives”
Bryan Carter, Univ. of Central Missouri, “Digital Africana Studies 3.0: Singularity, Performativity, and Technologizing the Field”
Maryemma Graham, Univ. of Kansas, “The Project on the History of Black Writing and Digital Possibilities”
For abstracts, write to hrambsy@siue.edu.
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3:30–4:45 p.m.
.70. Multimediated Brecht
Cedar, Sheraton
Program arranged by the International Brecht Society. Presiding: Kristopher Imbrigotta, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
Michael Shane Boyle, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “‘Literarization’ and the Radical Potential of Media”
Julia Draganovic, Modena, Italy, “Brecht’s Radio and Its Italian Legacy”
Michael Ryan, Duke Univ., “Brecht’s Media Theory: A Popular Reassessment”
Respondent: Henning Wrage, Haverford College
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82. Arabic Language and Identity: Transregional Texts and Transnational Discourses
Columbia, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Karin C. Ryding, Georgetown Univ.
Elizabeth M. Bergman, Miami Univ., Oxford, “Animating Linguistic Nationalism in Jordan”
Clara Shea, Georgetown Univ., “The Sound of the People: Popular Music and Identity in Lebanon”
Georgette Jabbour, Defense Language Inst., “The Way Forward to Teaching Arabic: Incorporating Dialect with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)”
Emily J. Selove, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “A Baghdadi Party Crasher in Isfahan”
For abstracts, write to rydingk@georgetown.edu
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97. Voicing Documentary
307, WSCC
Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: James V. Catano, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge
Jose Capino, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, “Voice- Over Narration in the Cold War Documentary”
Rebecca Sheehan, Harvard Univ., “The Essay Film and the Ontology of the Epistolary Image: Akerman, Marker, Godard”
James V. Catano, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge, “Voicing Authority: Confessing before God and Errol Morris”
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5:15–6:30 p.m.
115. Gender and Voice: Orality, Dissent, and Community in the Late Middle Ages
Virginia, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Presiding: Dorothy Kim, Vassar Coll.
Katherine G. Zieman, Univ. of Notre Dame, “Performing Ourselves: Gendering and Voicing in Pater Noster Commentaries”
Nicole Nolan Sidhu, East Carolina Univ., “Gender and the Unruly Female Voice in Piers Plowman”
Dorian Lugo- Bertrán, Univ. of Puerto Rico, “The Inscription of the Voice and Medieval Materiality in Teresa of Ávila’s Camino de perfección”
Anthony J. Cárdenas- Rotunno, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “The Gendered Voices of Leonor López de Córdoba and Teresa de Cartagena”
For abstracts, visit hosted .lib.uiowa .edu/smfs/mff/
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7:00–8:15 p.m.
142. Affect, Distance, Confession: Emotion and Popular Music
620, WSC
Program arranged by the Division on Popular Culture. Presiding: Sonnet Retman, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
John W. Mowitt, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “(I Can’t Get No) Affect”
Barry Shank, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Approaching Odd Future (OFWGKTA) from a Distant Place”
David R. Shumway, Carnegie Mellon Univ., “‘A Compulsion to Be Honest with My Audience’: Joni Mitchell and Confession”
Respondent: Sonnet Retman
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150. Digital Humanities and Internet Research
613, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: John Jones, Univ. of Texas, Dallas
Robin A. Reid, Texas A&M Univ., Commerce, “Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus for Humanities Research”
John Jones, Univ. of Texas, Dallas, “What the Digital Can’t Remember”
Jennifer Sano Franchini, Michigan State Univ., “Toward a Rhetoric of Collaboration: An Online Resource for Teaching and Learning Research”
For abstracts, visit http://robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/
Thursday Individual Papers of Interest
Mark Deggan, Univ. of British Columbia, “‘Not Bleeding, Singing’:The Operatic Legacy of ’Twixt Land and Sea,” 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 616, WSCC
Emilie Brancato, Univ. of Toronto, “Exploring Marguerite’s Voice in the Middle English Translation of the Mirouer des simples âmes,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., Virginia, Sheraton
Eric J.Hyman, Fayetteville State Univ., “The Filtered Voices of Margery Kempe,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., Virginia, Sheraton
John Melillo, Univ. of Arizona, “Empathic Noise,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., 608, WSCC2.
Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Princeton Univ, “Césaire’s Voice Lessons,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 618, WSCC
Robert J. Patterson, Georgetown Univ., “She Heard Nothing: Traumatized Cat and the Unsympathetic Listener in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 615, WSCC
Yonsoo Kim, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, “Women’s Voiced Desire and Muted Passions: Teresa de Cartagena and Santa Teresa,” 7:00–8:15 p.m., 620, WSC
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Statue of Jimi Hendrix at the Corner of Pike and Broadway, Seattle, WA by Flickruser bleachers
Friday, 6 January
8:30–9:45 a.m.
166. Tone in Narrative
617, WSCC
Program arranged by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Presiding: Molly Hite, Cornell Univ.
James Phelan, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Dialogue, Voice, and Tone; or, Exploring a Neglected Channel of Narrative Communication”
Debra Fried, Cornell Univ., “Taking a Wrong Tone”
Chris Rideout, Seattle Univ. School of Law, “Voice, Self, and Tonal Cues in Legal Discourse”
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174. The Opera Libretto
620, WSCC
Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations. Presiding: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.
Edward Anderson, Rice Univ. “Staging Authority—Ariosto, Early Opera, and the Society of Dead Poets”
Matthew Paul Carlson, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “English Verse Translations of Die Zauberlöte: Auden and Kallman versus McClatchy”
Ryan Kangas, Univ. of Houston, “Encountering the Mirror in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ and Der Zwerg”
Douglas Fisher, Florida State Univ., “Willie Stark: Carlisle Floyd’s Libretto Based on William Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men”
For abstracts, visit http://www.lyricasociety.org/
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188. Jimi Hendrix and the Poetics of Song
611, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Jacob Wilkenfeld, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Jeffrey Carroll, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “Dancing in Dylan’s Head: Jimi Hendrix and the Folk Tradition”
Daniel Barlow, Univ. of Pittsburgh, “Jimi Hendrix and the Politics of Blackness”
Michael New, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Voodoo Child: Jimi Hendrix and the African American Experimental Tradition”
Jacob Wilkenfeld, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix and the Poetics of Black Experience”
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10:15–11:30 a.m.
236. Remixing Present-Day English
306, WSCC
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Present-Day English Language. Presiding: Dulce M. Estevez, Arizona State Univ.
Nils Olov Fors, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania, “A Critical Analysis of Language Use Constructs in Discourses Related to Language Education in South Texas, 2000–10”
Jennifer M. Santos, Virginia Military Inst., “Agog or a Gag? Lady Gaga’s Remixes Remixed”
Dulce M. Estevez, Arizona State Univ., “Mixteando Languages in the United States”
Sarah Catherine Dean, Arizona State Univ., “Remixing English to Represent Trauma and Identity”
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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.
244. Dickinson’s Fictions of Voice
303, WSCC
Program arranged by the Emily Dickinson International Society. Presiding: Elizabeth Petrino, Fairield Univ.
Vivian R. Pollak, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Dickinson and Sincerity: The Nineteenth-Century Context”
Margaret Rennix, Harvard Univ., “The Speaking Dead: Animated Corpses and National Crisis in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Alfred Tennyson”
Ai’fe Murray, San Francisco, CA, “The Influence of Her Servants’ Ethnic Vernaculars on Emily Dickinson’s Language”
For abstracts, write to epetrino@ fairfield.edu
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245. Narrativity and Musicality: The Confluence of Language, Literature, and Culture
305, WSCC
Program arranged by the College Language Association. Presiding: Warren Carson, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg
Kameelah Martin Samuel, Georgia State Univ., “Of Blues Narrative and Conjure Magic: A Symbiotic Dialectic in the Fiction of Arthur Flowers and J. J. Phillips”
Dolan Hubbard, Morgan State Univ., “DuBois, Hansberry, and a Knock at Midnight”
Thabiti Lewis, Washington State Univ., Vancouver, “Teaching Hip-Hop and Black Vernacular Tradition While Tackling the Boogie Man”
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249. Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom
Grand A, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California
Speakers: Kathryn E. Crowther, Georgia Inst. of Tech.; Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Maureen Engel, Univ. of Alberta; Paul Fyfe, Florida State Univ.; Kathi Inman Berens; Janelle A. Jenstad, Univ. of Victoria; Charlotte Nunes, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Heather Zwicker, Univ. of Alberta
This electronic roundtable assumes that “building stuff” is foundational to the digital humanities and that the technical barriers to participation can be low. When teaching undergraduates digital humanities, simple tools allow students to focus on the simultaneous practices of building and interpreting. This show-and-tell presents projects of variable technical complexity that foster robust interpretation.
For abstracts, visit briancroxall.net/buildingDH
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259. Representation in the Shadow of New Media Technologies
304, WSCC
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada. Presiding: Lan Dong, Univ. of Illinois, Springield
Aymar Jean Christian, Univ. of Pennsylvania, “Web Video and Ethnic Media: Linking Representation and Distribution”
Daniel Greene, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Among Friends: Comparing Social Networking Functions in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Afro-American in 1904 and 1933″
Lisa Nakamura, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, “Digital Trash Talk: The Rhetoric of Instrumental Racism as Procedural Strategy”
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273. Queer Performance: Space, Bodies, and Movement(s)
620, WSCC
Program arranged by the GL/Q Caucus for the Modern Languages. Presiding: Francesca Therese Royster, DePaul Univ.
Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Univ. of Iowa“Race-ing Time through Queer Xicana Performance”
Robert McRuer, George Washington Univ., “Crip Out: Freakish Performance and the Rogue Queer History”
Sharon Bridgforth, DePaul Univ., “Ring or Shout”
For abstracts, write to ltorres@ depaul.edu.
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1:45–3:00 p.m.
283. What Makes Language Literary?
Metropolitan A, Sheraton
A linked session arranged in conjunction with The Presidential Forum: Language, Literature, Learning (202). Presiding: Sabine Wilke, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Speakers: Charles Francis Altieri, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Daniel Dooghan, Univ. of Tampa; Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD; Alexander C. Y. Huang, George Washington Univ.
This roundtable asks whether the familiar pairing “language and literature” is more than just an academic convention. Is literature a necessary function of language, or is language merely the vehicle with which literature pursues its own ends? At stake are questions of rhetoric and criticism, poetic language, the standing of translation, and the tensions between historical experience and aesthetic autonomy.
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294. Humor and Subversion: Approaches to Pacific Literature and Orature at the Universities of Hawai‘i and Guam
608, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Caroline Sinavaiana, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa
Caroline Sinavaiana, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “bro’Town and he Naked Samoans: Ritual Clowning Goes Prime Time”
Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Manoa, “Mokes with Jokes: Nah Nah Nah Nah—‘Bussing Laugh’ as Colonial Resistance”
Nicholas J. Goetzfridt, Univ. of Guam, “The Illusions of Betrayal: Mudrooroo, Indigenousness, and the Stage I Make”
Brandy Nalani McDougall, Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, “Anticolonial Humor and Poetic Resistance in the American Colonies of the Pacific”
Respondent: Craig Perez, Univ. of California, Berkeley
For abstracts, write to sinavaia@hawaii.edu
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298. Reading across Media
Aspen, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature. Presiding: Deniz Göktürk, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Lutz Koepnick, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Reading on the Move”
Heather Love, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, “Fighting Stupidity and Playing Music: Musil, Adorno, and the Performativity of Interpretation”
Daniel Gilillan, Arizona State Univ., “Literature on the Radio: Sound and the Intermedial Modulation of Knowledge”
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307. Theorizing Hip- Hop: New Approaches to Hip-Hop as Intellectual Production
618, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Jill Richardson, Borough of Manhattan Community Coll., City Univ. of New York
Shante Paradigm Smalls, Davidson Coll., “Queer Hip-Hop Diasporas: A History”
James Ford, Occidental Coll., “The Shadows of Tomorrow: Hip- Hop, Madlib, and the Archive”
Michael Ralph, New York Univ., “Hip- Hop Is Not What You Think It Is”
Jill Richardson, Borough of Manhattan Community Coll., City Univ. of New York, “Performing Male Desire: The Intersection of Hip- Hop and Drug Culture”
For abstracts, write to jilltrichardson@msn.com
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3:30–4:45 p.m.
325. Ireland and the Politics of Language
304, WSCC
Program arranged by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Presiding: Richard Russell, Baylor Univ.
Laura B. O’Connor, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Muse Energy: Releasing and Reinscribing the Spéirbhean”
Spurgeon W. Thompson, Kaplan International Colls., “‘English Is Dead’: Assassinating English in Finnegans Wake”
Kelly Matthews, Framingham State Univ., “‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew You!’: Sean O’Faolain, the Gaelic League, and Debates over Language and Literature in the Mid- Twentieth Century”
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332. Digital Narratives and Gaming for Teaching Language and Literature
Aspen, Sheraton
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Presiding: Barbara Laford, Arizona State Univ.
Steven Thorne, Portland State Univ., “Narrative Expression and Scientific Method in Online Gaming Worlds”
Jonathon Reinhardt, Univ. of Arizona; Julie Sykes, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “Designing Narratives: A Framework for Digital Game- Mediated L2 Literacies Development”
Edmond Chang, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Timothy Welsh, Loyola Univ., New Orleans, “Close Playing, Paired Playing: A Practicum”
Respondent: Dave McAlpine, Univ. of Arkansas, Little Rock
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5:15–6:30 p.m.
.349. Digital Pedagogy
Grand A, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Katherine D. Harris, San José State Univ.
Speakers: Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory Univ.; Elizabeth Chang, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia; Lori A. Emerson, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey; John Lennon, Univ. of South Florida Polytechnic; Kevin Quarmby, Shakespeare’s Globe Trust; Katherine Singer, Mount Holyoke Coll.; Roger Whitson, Georgia Inst. of Tech.
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Friday Individual Papers of Interest
Kimberly Wedeven Segall, Seattle Pacific Univ., “Heteroglossic Iraq: Voices of Women and War,” 8:30–9:45 a.m., 303, WSCC
Imani Perry, Princeton Univ., “Of Degraded Tongues and Digital Talk: Race and the Politics of Language,” 10:15 a.m.–12:00 noon, Metropolitan A, Sheraton
Emily M. Harrington, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Lyric and Music at the Fin de Siècle: The Cultural Place of Song,” 3:30–4:45 p.m., 611, WSCC
James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colls., “Of Moan and Stutter: M. Nourbese Philips’s Hauntological Zong!” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 614, WSCC
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The Experience Music Project, Seattle photo by Flickr user Brad Coy
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Back to menu
Saturday, January 7
Saturday, 7 January
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10:15–11:30 a.m.
450. Digital Faulkner: William Faulkner and Digital Humanities
615, WSCC
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society. Presiding: Steven Knepper, Univ. of Virginia
Speakers: Keith Goldsmith, Vintage Books; John B. Padgett, Brevard Coll.; Noel Earl Polk, Mississippi State Univ.; Stephen Railton, Univ. of Virginia; Peter Stoichef, Univ. of Saskatchewan
A roundtable on digital humanities and its implications for teaching and scholarship on the work of William Faulkner.
For abstracts, visit faulknersociety .com/ panels.htm
Discussions about digital projects and digital tools often focus on research goals. For this electronic roundtable, we will instead demonstrate how these digital resources, tools, and projects have been integrated into undergraduate and graduate curricula.
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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.
468. Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital-Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery
615, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Lauren Klein, Georgia Inst. of Tech.
Lauren Klein, Georgia Inst. of Tech.,“‘A Report Has Come Here’: Social-Network Analysis in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson”
Cameron Blevins, Stanford Univ., “Slave Narratives in Space: Mapping the World of Venture Smith”
Aditi Muralidharan, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Using Digital Tools to Explore Narrative Conventions in the North American Antebellum Slave Narratives”
Respondent: Amy Earhart, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
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477. Postnational Readings of the Audiovisual
Aspen, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature and the Division on Film. Presiding: Nora M. Alter, Temple Univ.,Philadelphia; Deniz Göktürk, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Kalani Michell, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities,“Sounds of the Berlin School”
Ian Thomas Fleishman, Harvard Univ., “International ‘Auditorism’: The Postnational Politics of Reading of von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others”
Jaimey Fisher, Univ. of California, Davis, “Surveying the Border Crossing: Terrorist Films and the Postnational Imaginary”
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479. Digital Humanities in the Italian Context
Cedar, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Manuela Marchesini, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
Stefano Franchi, Texas A&M Univ., College Station, “Digital Humanities in the Italian Culture Landscape”
Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M Univ., College Station, “Life and the Digital: On Esposito and Tarizzo’s Inventions of Life”
Massimo Lollini, Univ. of Oregon “Humanist Studies and the Digital Age”
Silvia Stoyanova, Princeton Univ., “Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone: From Card Index to Hypertext”
For abstracts, write to mmarchesini@tamu.edu
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484. Dissenting Voices
Columbia, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Division on ArabicLiterature and Culture. Presiding: Anouar Majid, Univ. of New England
Ibtissam Bouachrine, Smith Coll., “Why Moroccan Women Rebel”
Nouri Gana, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Hip- Hop Insurgency”
Olivier Bourderionnet, Univ. of New Orleans, “Building Bridges with Songs: Amazigh Kateb and Abd al-Malik”
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499. Literary Multilingualism and Exile in Twentieth-Century Fiction
Ravenna C, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Salvatore Pappalardo, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
Celine Piser, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Multilingualism and the Construction of a Hybrid Identity in Twentieth Century Judeo French Literature”
Hassan Melehy, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Jack Kerouac’s Translingual Exile”
Maria Kager, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, “Ahksent on Last Syllable: Mispronunciation in Nabokov’s American Novels”
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1:45–3:00 p.m.
506. Voice and Identity in Australian Literature
616, WSCC
Program arranged by the American Association of Australian Literary Studies. Presiding: Nathanael O’Reilly, Texas Christian Univ.
Jennifer McGovern, Univ. of Iowa, “Death by Torture in the Country of the Mind: Metaphors of Captivity and Freedom in Patrick White’s Voss (1957)”
Sarah Chihaya, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “The Un-death of Maggs: The Returned Convict as Revenant in Jack Maggs”
Nicholas Dunlop, Univ. of Birmingham, “Suburban Space and Multicultural Identities in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap”
Nathanael O’Reilly, Texas Christian Univ., “Rejecting Suburban Identity in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack”
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522. The Seattle Sound
618, WSCC
Program arranged by the Division on Popular Culture. Presiding: Hillary L. Chute, Univ. of Chicago
Lindsay E. Waters, Harvard Univ. Press, “Theory Alone Nothing; Theory plus Dancing Change the World: The Seattle Sound of Sleater-Kinney and Hendrix”
John Melillo, New York Univ., “Nirvana: Noise and Empathy”
John McCombe, Univ. of Dayton, “Virginia Woolf in the Trailer Park: Isaac Brock; Nowhere, WA; and the Lonesome, Crowded West”
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3:30–4:45 p.m.
539. # alt- ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities
3B, WSCC
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Computer Studies in Language and Literature. Presiding: Sara Steger, Univ. of Georgia
Speakers: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Julia H. Flanders, Brown Univ.; Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; Matthew Jockers, Stanford Univ.; Shana Kimball, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia; Lisa Spiro, National Inst. for Tech. in Liberal Education
This roundtable brings together various perspectives on alternative academic careers from professionals in digital humanities centers, libraries, publishing, and humanities labs. Speakers will discuss how and whether digital humanities is especially suited to fostering non-tenure- track positions and how that translates to the role of alt-ac in digital humanities and the academy. Related session: “# alt- ac: he Future of ‘Alternative Academic’ Careers” (595).
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5:15–6:30 p.m.
581. Digital Humanities versus New Media
611, WSCC
Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll., “Everything Old Is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future”
Andrew Pilsch, Penn State Univ., University Park, “As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies”
David Robert Gruber, North Carolina State Univ., “Digital Tunnel Vision: Deining a Rhetorical Situation”
Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ., “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies”
For abstracts, visit www .duke .edu/ ~ves4/mla201
Saturday Individual Papers of Interest
Erich Nunn, Auburn Univ., Auburn, “Music, Race, and Nation in Johnson’s Autobiography,” 1:45–3:00 p.m., 307, WSCC
Leslie Petty, Rhodes Coll., “‘Every Woman . . . Should Raise Her Voice’: Rethinking White Women’s Activism in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” 5:15–6:30 p.m., 307, WSCC
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Flyer for a Seattle Phonographers Union Performance, For information on the artists' collective see http://www.seapho.org/
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SUNDAY, January 8
Sunday, 8 January
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8:30–9:45 a.m.
638. Gettin’ Around: Transnational Jazz Literature
618, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Jürgen E. Grandt, Gainesville State Coll., GA
Rashida Braggs, Williams Coll., “From Harlem to Paris: A Transatlantic Interpretation of James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’”
Marc-Oliver Schuster, Univ. of Vienna, “Swinging Variety: Jazz in the Literature of the German Democratic Republic”
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Penn State Univ., University Park, “The Transplanetary Nation Blues and the Abstract Truth”
Respondent: DoVeanna Sherie Fulton Minor, Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
For abstracts, write to jgrandt@gsc.edu.
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10:15–11:30 a.m.
664. Sound and Voice in the Creative Writing Classroom: Practice-Based Pedagogies
614, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Christopher Drew, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
David Bartone, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Avoiding Meaning: A Classroom Exercise to Improve Students’ Homophonic Sensibilities”
David Yost, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee“Into the Trenches: Breaking the Student-Author Binary with ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’”
Liane LeMaster, Georgia Perimeter Coll., North Campus, “Speciicity of Dialogue: A Coke Is a Soda Is a Pop Is a Cola”
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665. Debates in the Digital Humanities
615, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Alexander Reid, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
Matthew K. Gold, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York, “Whose Revolution? Toward a More Equitable Digital Humanities”
Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego, “Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University”
Jeff Rice, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia, “Twenty-First- Century Literacy: Searching the Story of Billy the Kid”
Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria, “Why the Digital Humanities Needs Theory”
For abstracts and discussion, visit dhdebatesmla12.wordpress.com.
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12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.
691. Gertrude Stein and Music
Cedar, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations and the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism. Presiding: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.
Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Sounding Stein’s Texts by Using Digital Tools for Distant Listening”
Judith A. Roof, Rice Univ., “Gertrude’s Glee and Jazz Mislaid Jazz”
Brandon Masterman,Univ. of Pittsburgh, “‘This Is How hey Do Not Like It’: Queer Abjection in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts”
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716. Digital Material
613, WSCC
A special session. Presiding: Charles M. Tung, Seattle Univ.; Benjamin Widiss, Princeton Univ.
Speakers: Paul Benzon, Temple Univ., Philadelphia; Cara Elisabeth Ogburn, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Charles M. Tung; Benjamin Widiss; Zachary Zimmer, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.
Is there gravity in digital worlds? Moving beyond both lamentations and celebrations of the putatively free- loating informatic empyrean, this roundtable will explore the ways in which representations in myriad digital platforms—verbal, visual, musical, cinematic—might bear the weight of materiality, presence, and history and the ways in which bodies—both human and hardware—might be recruited for or implicated in the efort.
For abstracts, write to bwidiss@princeton.edu
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1:45–3:00 p.m
736. Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies
University, Sheraton
A special session. Presiding: Mark L. Sample, George Mason Univ.
Speakers: Edmond Chang, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Steven E. Jones, Loyola Univ., Chicago; Jason C. Rhody, National Endowment for the Humanities; Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore; Timothy Welsh, Loyola Univ., New Orleans; Zach Whalen, Univ. of Mary Washington
This roundtable moves beyond the games-versus-stories dichotomy to explore the full range of possible literary approaches to video games. These approaches include the theoretical and methodological contributions of reception studies, reader-response theory, narrative theory, critical race and gender theory, disability studies, and textual scholarship.
For abstracts, visit www .samplereality .com/ mla12.
745. Affecting Affect
615, WSCC
A special session, Presiding: Lauren Berlant, Univ. of Chicago
Speakers: Ann L. Cvetkovich, Univ. of Texas, Austin; Neville W. Hoad, Univ. of Texas, Austin;Heather K. Love, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Tavia Nyong’o, New York Univ.
For a list of questions for roundtable participants (and the potential interlocutors from the audience), visit www.supervalentthought.com.
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Sunday Individual Papers of Interest
Toni Wall Jaudon, Ithaca Coll., “Sound and Separateness: The Hindu Widow’s Cries in Early-Nineteenth-Century United States Print Culture,” 1:45–3:00 p.m., 304, WSCC
Grunge: One of Seattle's Signature Sounds, Photo by Flickr User Sands
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The Sound of Hippiesomething, or Drum Circles at #OccupyWallStreet
Photo from Zuccotti Park, September 28 2011 by Flickr user David Shankbone
Last week’s news was been full of alarming stories of real and threatened violence at various #Occupy sites around America. But also disturbing were the reports that complaints about the continuous drumming at the Occupy Wall Street site in Lower Manhattan were threatening to shut the entire operation down. According to stories in N + 1, slate.com, Mother Jones, and New York, the ten hour marathon drum circles at Zuccotti Park have been a focal point of mounting tensions, both between the occupiers and the drummers, and between the occupiers and the community at large. Last week, community members asked that the drummers limit their drumming to 2 hours a day, a request backed by actual OWS protesters. The drummers, loosely organized in a group called PULSE, initially resisted the restriction, claiming that such requests mimicked those of the government they were protesting against. Since then, a compromise has been worked out, but the situation gives rise to a host of questions about race, sound, drums, and protest.
Community organizers both inside and outside OWS said they were distressed by the continuous noise that these protesters are making, and certainly they had reason: as Jon Stewart put it in his episode of talking points, “it’s a public space, it’s for everyone, including people who don’t consider drum circles to be sleepy time music.”
Writer and singer Henry Rollins agrees, telling LA Weekly that he dreams of an #Occupy Music festival, because “So far [he has] heard people playing drums and other percussion instruments” but still wonders “if there will be a band or bands who will be a musical voice to this rapidly growing gathering of citizens.” Rage Against the Machine guitarist and frequent #Occupier Tom Morello also seems to concur, telling Rolling Stone, “Normally protests of this nature are furtive things, It’ll be 12 people with a small drum circle and a couple of red flags. But this has become something that people feel part of.” Stewart, Rollins, and Morello all have a point: not everyone likes drum circles, in fact some people feel quite strongly about them, which has the potential to be divisive for a movement famously representing “the 99%.”
But over and above the questions of musical taste, the very audible presence of snare drums, cymbals, and entire drum sets at OWS—more often found in marching bands or suburban garage band practice spaces than the usual drum circle staple, the conga—raises a different set of questions, both sonic and social, around the interrelated issues of “noise,” public space, and privilege.
That a drum circle populated by a large number of bad, mostly white drummers is being touted as “the sound” of occupation isn’t that surprising, at least not for alumni of UC Berkeley.
In my day, a more conga-oriented drum circle sprouted up on Sproul Plaza every Sunday; today, a similar one occupies a green space in Golden Gate Park right across from Hippie Hill, pretty much 24/7. (I walk by it every Thursday on my way to the gourmet food trucks: happily, the delicious smell of garlic noodles and duck taco obliviates all other senses.)
These kinds of regular, yet impromptu, circles abound in California and elsewhere: indeed, the sound of drum circles à la OWS has characterized certain types of social spaces for the last forty years. But what exactly does the sound of drum circles characterize? What meaning is being made by them, and why?
Drumming and Dancing the Bamboula in Place Congo, circa 1880
In the Americas, drum circles go back hundreds of years– many indigenous peoples have drumming traditions, for example, and, in Congo Square in New Orleans, slaves of African ancestry gathered weekly to dance to the rhythms they played on the bamboula, a bamboo drum with African origins, beginning in the early 1700s. The notion of the “circle” was a fundamental part of the dancing and music making at Congo Square—according to Gary Donaldson, the circles represented the memories of African nationalities and various reunited tribes people—and was echoed in various types of “ring shouts” across the West Indies and the Southern U.S. The contemporary drum circle stand-by, the conga, also came to the Americas via the forced migration of slaves; it is of Cuban origin but with antecedents in Africa, like the bamboula. The black power movements of the 1960s drew on this history—and sound—to good effect, reigniting semi-permanent drum circles in many U.S. neighborhoods– like the formal gathering that meets in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem on Saturdays that is currently also under fire from a nearby condo association –audibly announcing their presence and enacting new community formations.
Given this history–and without erasing the presence of drummers of color at OWS--it can seem puzzling how the drum circle has come to occupy such a curiously whitened position in America’s cultural zeitgeist. Furthermore, one of the more problematic aspects of the OWS drum circle debate is the racialized implications of the instrumentation there—implications borne out by videos of OWS that show an overabundance of snares, some of the loudest drums available. According to percussionist Joe Taglieri, “no conga is louder than a fiberglass drum with a synthetic head.” If snares are louder than congas, then noise – actual decibel level — is probably not the sole issue when community groups attempt to control or oust drummers like those in Marcus Garvey Park. It does seem to be a key point of contention at OWS, however.
While there is also a history of African American marching bands, especially in the South, snare drums speak to a different set of American cultural traditions. Drum kits themselves evolved from Vaudeville, when theater space restrictions (and tight pay rolls) precluded inviting a large marching band inside. Mainstream associations with snares include but are not limited to army parades, high school marching bands, and of course hard rock music. Sometimes, like in the case of Tommy Lee, it is an unholy alliance of several of these contexts.
Tommy Lee, formerly with Motley Crue, drumming for the University of Nebraska
In other words, outside of OWS, snares are hardly the sound of social upheaval.
How the drum circle became associated with political protest in the first place is interesting. Although people sometimes associate drum circles with beatniks rather than hippies, a case could be made that they actually connect more strongly to an electrified Woodstock rather than an acoustic Bleecker Street, thanks in part to Michael Shrieve’s widely mediated turn during Santana’s performance of “Soul Sacrifice” at the 1969 festival.
It is important to note that Shrieve is playing the traps in this sequence, not the conga, which is one reason I’d like to suggest that something about that scene – the hands on the congas, the grins of the other guys, the ecstatic face of a 20-year-old as he slams his kit, and the fetishistic gaze of the camera on the sticks, the skins and the cymbals – caught the imagination of a particular segment of American society. Santana’s band – two Mexican Americans (Carlos Santana and Mike Carabello), a Nicaraguan (Chepito Areas), two whites (Shrieve and Gregg Rolie, who later plagued the world in Journey) and an African American (bassist David Brown)—was truly multi-racial, creating a “small world” visual that furthered Woodstock’s utopian rhetoric in ways that were surely not borne out by the demographics of its audience. More importantly perhaps, the Woodstock movie showed a white suburban hippie guy as an equal participant in a multi-ethnic rhythmic stew, a powerful image in the 1960s. Indeed, the Santana performance may be precisely the moment when the idea of the drum circle was lifted from the context of “black power” and moved into the hippie mainstream.
When's the last time you've seen a drummer on a magazine cover?: Santana on Rolling Stone's Woodstock special issue
Woodstock made congas hip to the mass of America—not just in Santana’s set but also in the performances of Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix—and Woodstock helped define what the drum circle meant, in part by encapsulating certain discursive tropes that were very particular to those times. For example, drum circles epitomize the ’60s idea that political action is simultaneously self-expressive and collective. If a crowd of people sing “We Shall Overcome” or chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh/The NLF is going to win,” it is a a collective act. It’s collective even if the crowd is singing “Yellow Submarine” and it’s not overtly political. By contrast, drum circles are about improvisation, so each drummer can “do his own thing” while participating in the groupthink. (The “his” is implied: video of drum circles show few women participants. Apparently Janet Weiss, Meg White, and Sheila E.’s “own thing” can actually be done on their own.)
In terms of sound, drum circles also project well beyond their immediate location, compared to singing and chanting (in fact, OWS has had problems with the drum circles drowning out its “human microphone”). Plus, since the drummers can take breaks and change out, the actual drumming never stops, unlike a performing musician. Thus, drum circles are celebrations of self expression that are actively imposed on an audience that is well beyond eyesight. This summarizes a modern view of personality rooted in the 1960s: that it’s not enough to participate, you’ve also got to “be yourself.” I think these two notions account for the enduring idea of the drum circle as a supposedly political sound, even when it’s not. Drumming in a drum circle allows for a public display of self-expression that simultaneously allows the participant to belong to a group. The appeal of that is obvious, especially in our contemporary iCulture. However, the politicization of the sound of drum circles only makes sense when you add in the lingering sonic traces of black protest, modulated through a hippie lens. You can see this clearly in New York magazine’s “Bangin’: A Drum Circle Primer” (10.30.11), whose visual imagery prominently features a West African djembe drum and describes only the “hippie-era use of traditional African instruments” rather than their actual, snare-heavy configuration at OWS. Despite the snares and in spite of the oft-commented on lack of black faces at OWS—see Greg Tate’s piece in the Village Voice—drum circles still carry enough connotations of militant blackness to annoy the bourgeoisie.
One key thing differentiates OWS’s drummers from the demonstrations of yore, however: in the 60s and early 70s, there was a notion that drum circles were for drummers. Santana’s band, though young, was made up of world class musicians from the San Francisco scene. But to a certain type of viewer – young, white and male—the drum circle must have seemed so doable. Compared to the singular virtuosity of Jimi Hendrix or sheer talent of Pete Townshend, Santana’s music was the sonic equivalent of socialism. No wonder the drum circle scene has had more of a half-life in the hearts and minds of would-be Woodstockians than just about any other: it is a visceral depiction of music as communal, ecstatic, and accessible. Today, thanks to the far-reaching waves of the movie Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1970), the percussive noise such a circle makes creates a particular sonic backdrop that clearly—and nostalgically—says hippiesomething.
Photo by Flickr user Paul Townsend
And yet, politically speaking, nostalgia is, as theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno have frequently reminded us, invariably associated with Fascism. From Mussolini to Hitler to Reagan to Glenn Beck, it’s a tactic that has been explicitly invoked to thwart social progress. The nostalgia conundrum seems to have escaped both mainstream news media—which uses the drum circle to signify to viewers that OWS is a radical leftist plot—as well as the drummers themselves. For the drummers are hippies, and hippies young and old really believe in drum circles. Hippies take part in them, hippies enjoy them. It’s fair to say, however, that few others do, just as no one ever really enjoyed the 45- minute drum solos on live records by Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Iron Butterfly. (I’m thinking about Ginger Baker’s “Toad,” John Bonham’s “Moby Dick,” and “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” respectively. Also about the time I went to the bathroom and bought popcorn at the LA Forum during a drum solo by some band I know forget, and still had to sit through ten more minutes.) .
Corporate Teambuilding in Boston, by Exclusive Events
However, that fact does not seem to bother those involved in drum circles, and herein lies the great problem with the whole equation drum + hippie = activism. To any members of the mainstream media who hears and records them, a drum circle instantly conjures up a chaotic, possibly even violent, scene: Chicago ‘68, Seattle 2000, Oakland 2011. But the truth is that, outside Fox News, the noun “hippie” no longer means “liberal,” or possibly even politically engaged. The curious thing about drum circles, then, is that while they sound progressive, they can actually mean conservative. A 2006 piece from NPR, for example, describes how drum circles have been adapted as teambuilding exercises for corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.
The OWS situation illustrates such conservatism in different ways. In another recent article in New York Magazine, a 19 year old drummer from New Jersey is quoted as saying, “Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.” This is said in the face of opposition from the movement’s own management, who fear a shutdown due to severe problems with neighborhood groups and restrictions on the General Assembly’s call-and-response “mic checks” that have been so galvanizing. His words are instructive as well as ominous, illustrating that young hippies like him believe that the sound of drums is a suitable replacement for protest or action itself.
The idea that sound alone can energize a movement is not just wrong, it also showcases a willful misunderstanding within the ranks of OWS. In Oakland last week, a small band of anarchists threw bottles at the police, whose wrath rained down in the form of tear gas canisters and a fusillade of dowels: one protester, an Iraq veteran, has been seriously injured.
The incident highlights a kind of cognitive dissonance that is hindering the ability of OWS to achieve political progress. The drumming problems at Zuccotti Park highlight the way that history can repeat itself as farce, as the distance between nostalgia and action — and between sound and meaning — disturbs the peace in more ways than one. Just as drummers in Sproul Plaza refuse to acknowledge that UC Berkeley is now mainly host to computer science and business majors, and drummers in Golden Gate Park refuse to deal with a Haight Ashbury that is gentrifying in front of their eyes, so too do the drummers at OWS refuse to acknowledge that their sound is no longer the sound of social activism. Indeed, the sound of a drum circle is reminiscent of the ring of a telephone, the scratch of a needle dropped on a record, or the clip clop of horse hoofs on hay-covered streets. No wonder it sounds out of place at OWS.
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Gina Arnold recently received her Ph.D. in the program of Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University, where she is currently a post doctoral scholar. Prior to beginning graduate work, she was a rock critic. Her dissertation, which draws on historical archives, literature, and films about counter cultural rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970 as well as on her own experience covering the less counter cultural rock festivals of the 1990s, is called Rock Crowds & Power. It is about rock crowds and power.
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