CFP: Amplifying Du Bois at 150, Due 5/1/18

Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO! intends to amplify the commemoration of the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth by calling for work that examines his all-too-often and all-too-long unacknowledged role in developing, furthering, challenging, and shaping what we now know as “sound studies.”

In short, we invite 250 word pitches for short essays, online art installations, creative work,  podcasts , and/or manifestos that reimagine sound studies with Du Bois at the center. How does attention to Du Bois’s theories of race and sound encourage us to challenge the ways in which white supremacy has historically shaped American institutions, sensory orientations, and fields of study? What new futures emerge when we listen to Du Bois as a thinker and agent of sound? What would a decolonized understanding and history of sound studies sound like, and how has Du Bois been urging us to attune ourselves to it? It has been an abundant decade-plus (!!!) since Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies “link[ed] the formal structure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of DJs” (13) and we want to know how you have thought about and listened with Du Bois in your work in the intervening years.  How does Du Bois as DJ remix both the historiography and the contemporary praxis of sound studies?

We especially encourage work across the long span of Du Bois’s career, and in a multiplicity of Du Boisian genres (novel, essay, study, radio, autobiograpy/memoir, editorial work. . .).  Your writing can be personal, critical, historical, academic-y, or an iconoclastic mix of all of those. We welcome research-based posts and posts examining aural experiences through a first-person narrative style; many of our posts mix both. We also welcome artistic posts that use the blog format to create an original audio-visual experience.

Please send your 250-word pitch to Jennifer Stoever (jstoever@binghamton.edu) by May 1, 2018. If chosen, your draft  (1000-1200 words max) will be due by June 15^th, 2018. The series will be published in a special series in July, so make sure you have time for edits at the end of June. And don’t forget to read our mission statement, submission guidelines (and peruse some posts) before sending us your stuff.