Sound at ASA 2014
The 2014 American Studies Association meeting will be held in Los Angeles, an appropriate setting for this year’s theme, “Fun and the Fury: Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century.” The conference, which will take place from November 6-9, will offer panels of interest to Sound Studies scholars. The City of Angels has long served as a muse for artists and thinkers interested in creating innovative worlds. Los Angeles is a place of experimentation and futuristic transformation, or as Norman Mailer called it, a constellation of plastic. Part of Mexico until 1848, Los Angeles is a global metropolis that embodies the keen contradictions of national and capital in the 21st century, often exposing the nuts and bolts that hold together these structures. Fun, fury, and the “dialectics of pleasure and pain” are useful for conceptualizing the sharp contrasts that characterize the city of LA itself. A panel on Sunday, Central Avenue Breakdown: Gender, Race, and Coming of Age in a Los Angeles Jazz Community, will discuss the historical complexities of the city of Los Angeles by way of the African American entertainment district of Central Avenue (Sunday 2:00-3:45).
This year’s ASA program features an increase in sound and music-related papers in comparison to last year’s conference in Washington, D.C., which was concerned with the logic of debt. The upswing is partially due to the 2014 theme, which emphasizes the production of alternative spaces that counter repressive forces. As the program committee, comprised of co-chairs J. Jack Halberstam, Fred Moten, and Sandra Soto, writes, “The critical power of ‘fun’ in this unconventional convention theme seeks nothing less than the reimagining of possibility, impossibility, probability and freedom.” Sound Studies is already geared toward thinking about how careful listening can offer new ways of being-in-the-world, so the increase in music-themed panels this year is not surprising. As music scholars and listeners have long insisted, music is foundational to embodied experiences of pleasure and fun. Music’s ability to transport listeners and to cultivate collectivity makes it uniquely relevant to discussions of pleasure.
“So Much Noise” by Flickr user Doran, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
One notable exception to the musical focus is the second of the two ASA Sound Studies Caucus panels, “The Racial Politics of Listening: ‘Accents,’ Hate Speech, and Language in the U.S. Media,” which will take place on Saturday from 2:00-3:45. Featuring Dolores Inés Casillas, Sara Hinojos, Marci McMahon, and SO! Editor-in-Chief, Jennifer Stoever, The panel will examine the role of speech and auditory cues in constructing racial representations. An individual paper by Craig Eley in the Environment and Culture Caucus panel Ecologies of Pleasure and Pain: Deviance, Destruction and Desire in Environmental History, entitled Psychologically Ultimate Seashores: Natural Sound, Personal Pleasure, and Recording Technologies is also worth mentioning (Sunday 10:00-11:45).
This year’s call for papers asked for participants to formulate creative modes for presenting their work, and Sound Studies scholars are stepping up. The first panel hosted by the ASA Sound Studies Caucus (Saturday 10:00-11:45) is an exciting listening dialogue entitled “Power Ballads and Blurred Lines: Songs from the Boundaries of Fun.” The commentators, Jeff Chang, Alice Echols, Evelyn McDonnell, Oliver Wang, and Rubén Martinez, will each play a song and discuss how pop music that is treated as harmless fun may nevertheless speak to social dynamics in real and important ways. A roundtable on Music, Fashion and the Power of (Queer) Nightlife (Friday 12:00-1:45) will include scholars of nightlife as well as party promoters and DJs, discussing the possibility for belonging in subcultural “nightworlds.”
“Hotel Bonaventure” by Flickr user S. N. Johnson-Roehr, CC BY-NC 2.0
This year there are a number of notable African American Studies panels, including After the Rain: Vanguardist Jazz in the Seventies (Thursday 10:00-11:45) organized in memory of Amiri Baraka, Stomp, Swerve, Rattle, and Roll: Fun and Pleasure as Political Resistance in American Blues Music (Thursday 4:00-5:45), What Words Can’t Do: Instrumentals, Identity, and Interpretation (Sunday 10:00-11:45), and Pleasure, Pain, Politics, and Performance: Black Women Artists and Their Fans (Sunday 12:00-1:45). The category of pleasure provides a framework for panels on The Aesthetics of Pleasure in California Funk (Sunday 10:00-11:45) and Performative Pleasures of Blackness: The Creation, Consumption, and Conflict of Pleasurable Blacknesses. Sound scholars also continue to investigate transnational modes of listening, in panels such as The Transnational Movements of Hip-Hop (Thursday 12:00-1:45), Fugitive Preludes: Chicana/o Popular Music and the Neoliberal City (Friday 10:00-11:45), and Performing Decolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of Pain and Pleasure in Music Across the Americas (Friday 12:00-1:45).
Two years ago, Jennifer Stoever mentioned that work in the field of Sound Studies was entering a period of reflection and becoming more nuanced and robust with sub-fields starting to develop. It is clear from this year’s program that the field is both broadening and deepening its focus. After two years of official recognition under the ASA Sound Studies Caucus and three years after the publication of Sound Clash, the special issue of American Quarterly, scholarship on sound in American Studies is developing in a myriad of ways and is coming into its own as a field.
Jump to THURSDAY, November 6
Jump to FRIDAY, November 7
Jump to SATURDAY, November 8
Jump to SUNDAY, November 9
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Featured image: “Carmaheaven” by Flickr user waltarrrrr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Please comment to let SO! know what you think–both before and after ASA 2013. If we somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let our Managing Editor know!: lms@soundingoutblog.com
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Meghan Drury is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at the George Washington University. She received an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Riverside in 2006. She is currently working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Aural Exotics: The Middle East in American Popular Music 1950-2011.” This project examines the interplay between popular music and American cultural representations of the Middle East from the mid-20th century to the present, illustrating how music and sound acted a means of consolidating and disseminating a range of ideas about Middle Eastern culture in the American mainstream. She is particularly interested in the way that sound increased the visibility of Arab Americans both before and after 9/11, offering a space for negotiations of identity. More broadly, Meghan’s interests include sound studies, U.S.-Middle East cultural relations, and Arab American cultural performance.
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“Echo Park September 2010” by Flickr user Calvin Fleming
THURSDAY, November 6th, 2014
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Religiosity and Altered States
Westin Bonaventure, Los Feliz (L1)
—Richard Cullen Rath, University of Hawai’i, Manoa (HI)
Dangerous Fun in Puritan New England: Mary Ross and the Singing Quakers
Riots, Radios, and the Historical Record: Mass Media and Crisis in Twentieth American Literature and Art
Westin Bonaventure, San Bernardino (L1)
—Hadji Bakara, University of Chicago (IL)
Guernica on the Radio: Anti-Fascism, Mass Media, and the Emergence of Human Rights Activism
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
Playing with Rules: Having Fun and Keeping Order in Mid-Century Racial Liberalism
Westin Bonaventure, San Fernando (L1)
—Yusuke Torii, Setsunan University (Japan)
S. I. Hayakawa’s Jazz Credentials and Racial Liberalism in Mid-Century America
—Masayoshi Yamada, Doshisha University (Japan)
Jazz, Fans, and the Pleasure of Listening during Turbulent Times
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After the Rain: Vanguardist Jazz in the Seventies (in memory of Amiri Baraka)
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel C (L1)
CHAIR:
Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)
PAPERS:
Paul A. Anderson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)
“Thunder Blossoms Gorgeously”: Abstracting the Pastoral in Marion Brown’s Georgia Trilogy
Robert Maclean, The College of Wooster (OH)
Ensemble After Eventuality: Neoliberalism and the Duo Form
Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University (NY)
Notes Toward a “Loft” History of Jazz
COMMENT:
Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Fun in Public: The Cultures of Amateur Labor
Westin Bonaventure, Palos Verdes (L1)
—Alexander W. Corey, University of Colorado, Boulder (CO)
Impulsive Triads: Frédéric Chopin, Amateur Pianists, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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The Transnational Movements of Hip-Hop
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Monica D (L3)
CHAIR:
Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University (IL)
PAPERS:
Lenna Tayseer Odeh, University of California, San Diego (CA)
Acts of Sumud: Exploits of Resistance Through the Palestinian Hip-Hop Youth and Political Prisoner Movements
Najwa Mayer, Yale University (CT)
Muhammad was a punk rocker: Seeking Faith, Fun, and Form in Taqwacore
Elliott H. Powell, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN)
The Sounds of Afro-South Asian Pleasure: Hip Hop, 9/11, and South-South Connections
Halifu Osumare, University of California, Davis (CA)
Play and Pain in Black Atlantic Hip-Hop: Hiplife in Ghana as Case Study
COMMENT:
Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University (IL)
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
alt. Black Musical History
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel C (L1)
CHAIR:
Courtney Michael Brown, California State University, Fullerton (CA)
PAPERS:
Matthew Hayden Anthony, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg (PA)
I Got Country Roots: Race, Identity and Black Country Singers in the 1970s
Kreg Abshire, Johnson & Wales University (CO)
On Sonic Nostalgia: Making Sense of alt.country’s Hip Traditionalism
Keith D. Leonard, American University (DC)
Who Stole the Soul: An Avant-Garde History of the Dark Room Collective
Christa Holm Vogelius, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (AL)
The Jennie C. Lee Archive and the Silent Musical History of the Tuskegee Institute
COMMENT:
Courtney Michael Brown, California State University, Fullerton (CA)
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The Choreography of Protest
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara B (L1)
—Sarah Ehlers, University of Houston (TX)
The Joys of the Picket Line: Reading the Rhythms of the Left
—Robert Michael Zecker, Saint Francis Xavier University (Canada)
A Mandolin Orchestra Could Attract a Lot of Attention: Interracial Fun with Radical Immigrants, 1930–1954
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Empire of Funk: Hip Hop and Representation in Filipina/o America—A Roundtable
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara C (L1)
CHAIR:
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, San Francisco State University (CA)
PANELISTS:
Roderick Labrador, University of Hawai’i, Manoa (HI)
Mark Villegas, University of California, Irvine (CA)
Mario “Nomi” De Mira, Artist
Stephen Bischoff, Washington State University, Pullman (WA)
COMMENT:
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, San Francisco State University (CA)
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On Athletes and Outlaws: Asian Americans in Popular Culture and the Pleasures of Recognition
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Monica C (L3)
—Douglas S. Ishii, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
Not about race, per se: Dave Boyle’s Asian American Music Film
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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Love and Rage: Cultural Strategies in Postwar U.S. Anarchism
Westin Bonaventure, San Bernardino (L1)
—Shon MeckFessel, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)
From a Disavowal of Commitment to a Commitment of Disavowal: (Non)Left Positionalities in 1980s Post-Punk and Anarchy-Punk
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Alternative Economies of Pleasure in Contemporary Southern Working-Class Cultures
Westin Bonaventure, San Pedro (L1)
—Nicholas Neil Gorrell, University of Mississippi (MS)
Economies of Scarcity and Abundance in Contemporary Southern Blues
—Anne Gessler, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
Second Lines, Creative Economies, and Gentrification: Music Cooperatives in Post-Katrina New Orleans
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Stomp, Swerve, Rattle, and Roll: Fun and Pleasure as Political Resistance in American Blues Music
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Monica A (L3)
CHAIR:
Daphne Brooks, Yale University (CT)
PAPERS:
Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University (NC)
“Let Me Bang Your Box”: The “Erotic Life” of the Blues
Sonnet Retman, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)
Memphis Minnie’s Jukebox Blues
Kimberly Mack, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
“That Natural Blues Man Look”: Black Elvis and the Demythologization of the Black Blues Figure
R. J. Smith, Independent Scholar
Calling All Freaks!: The Licentious Blues Spirit of the Rent Party and the Buffet Flat
COMMENT:
Adam Gussow, University of Mississippi (MS)
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**Wildness: The Fun and the Fury of Anarchy**
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel C (L1)
CHAIR:
Mel Y. Chen, University of California, Berkeley (CA)
PAPERS:
Peter Coviello, Bowdoin College (ME)
The Wild Less Than the Good: Erotics and Biopolitics in Thoreau
Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California (CA)
‘Wildness at the End of the World’
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University (NY)
William Blake’s Wild America
COMMENT:
Mel Y. Chen, University of California, Berkeley (CA)
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“Busker (street musician) #2” by Flickr user Sunny Lapin, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
FRIDAY, November 7th
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Feeling Queer
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel B (L1)
—Elias Krell, Northwestern University (IL)
Mixing Sound: Technologies of Fem(me)ninity and Mixed Race in Kelly Moe
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Life-Writing, Musical Lives
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel C (L1)
CHAIR:
Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)
PAPERS:
Nassim Winnie Balestrini, Karl-Franzens-University (Austria)
Fun, Fury, Fans: Affective Strategies in Intermedial Hip-Hop Life Writing
Mercy Romero, Sonoma State University (CA)
Two Lives in Music
Petra Rivera-Rideau, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA)
The Pleasures and Pains of Love: Listening to La Lupe and Ivy Queen
Jessica Elaine Teague, University of Nevada–Las Vegas (NV)
Charles Mingus and the Serious Fun of Jazz Autobiography
COMMENT:
Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)
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**Caucus: War and Peace Studies: Reconsidering the ‘R and R’: Dialectics of Violence and Pleasure in Militarism**
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Anita B (L1)
—Patricia Stuelke, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA)
You’re a Criminal as Long as You’re Mind: The U.S. Invasion of Panama and the Sounds of Bad Romance
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**ASA Program Committee: Uncontrolled Substances/Altered States**
Westin Bonaventure, Level 1, San Bernadino
—Josh Kun, University of Southern California (CA)
The Musical Más Allá: Narco/Necro/Anarco
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
Fugitive Preludes: Chicana/o Popular Music and the Neoliberal City
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel C (L1)
CHAIR:
Christina Zanfagna, Santa Clara University (CA)
PAPERS:
Wanda Alarcón, University of California, Berkeley (CA)
Variations on a Theme: Performing América on the National Stage
Jonathan Gomez, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)
Teen Post to Rainbow Alley: Facing Unexpectancy with Unexpectant Punk Rock Social Spaces
Kurt Newman, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)
Undoing the Math: Chingo Bling, the “Not-All,” and the Politics of Parody
COMMENT:
Christina Zanfagna, Santa Clara University (CA)
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Willful Subjects: Action, Agency, and Politics
Westin Bonaventure, San Anita B (L1)
—Neil Roberts, Williams College (MA)
It’s Bigger than Hip Hop: Decoding the Trayvon Martin Event
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Music, Fashion and the Power of (Queer) Nightlife
Westin Bonaventure, Los Cerritos (L1)
CHAIR:
Madison Moore, King’s College London (England)
PANELISTS:
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, King’s College London (England)
Matthew D. Morrison, Columbia University (NY)
Victor P. Corona, Fashion Institute of Technology (NY)
Gregory Alexander, Artist
Loren Granic, Artist
Amy Cakes Danky Dank, Artist
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High on Crack: Surveillance, Loss and Addiction in Black Communities
Westin Bonaventure, San Fernando (L1)
—Andreana Clay, San Francisco State University (CA)
“Kick in the Bass”: Sonic Navigation of Pleasure and Pain in Crack Lyrics
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Performing Decolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of Pain and Pleasure in Music Across the Americas
Westin Bonaventure, San Pedro (L1)
CHAIR:
Jaime Cardenas, Seattle Central Community College (WA)
PAPERS:
Marie “Keta” Miranda, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)
Polka Dawgs: Tejana/o Dance as Pleasure in Response to Racial and Class Subordination
Marco Cervantes, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)
Third Root Poetics Through Hip Hop Aesthetics: Performative Autoethnographies and Musical Empowerment
COMMENT:
Jaime Cardenas, Seattle Central Community College (WA)
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Twelve Years a Slave: Sounds and Spectacles of Slavery
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Anita A (L1)
—Paul Fess, City University of New York, Graduate Center (NY)
“The most excruciating noise”: Power Structures of Music in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave
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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Bittersweet: Remaking the Exhibit “American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music” for the Smithsonian Institution
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel A (L1)
CHAIR:
Juan Flores, New York University (NY)
PANELISTS:
Marisol Berrios Miranda, Independent Scholar
Shannon Dudley, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)
Njoroge Njoroge, University of Hawai’i, Manoa (HI)
Victor Hugo Viesca, California State University, Los Angeles (CA)
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We’re Listening: Surveillance Technologies and Non-Private Publics
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Monica B (L3)
CHAIR:
Gus Stadler, Haverford College (PA)
PAPERS:
Andrew Hamsher, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
Controlling Fantasyland: Surveillance and Freedom in Transmedia Storyworlds
Jason Farman, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
Creative Misuse as Resistance: Surveillance, Mobile Technologies, and Locative Games
Brian Hochman, Georgetown University (DC)
Eavesdrop Nation: The Rise of ‘Private Ear’ Wiretap, 1959-1974
Stephen Knadler, Spelman College (GA)
Kerry’s OMG Washington: Re-Scandalizing Racial Surveillance in the Obama Era
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“2nd Street Tunnel, Los Angeles — Dec 30, 2010” by Flickr user Ray_from-LA, CC BY 2.0
SATURDAY, November 8th
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Indigeneity and Difference
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara B (L1)
Elizabeth Sine, University of California, San Diego (CA)
Native Jazz: Radical Multiraciality and the Politics of Desire in an Age of Global Crisis
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
Caucus: Sound Studies: Power Ballads and Blurred Lines: Songs from the Boundaries of Fun
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara C (L1)
CHAIR:
Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (AL)
PANELISTS:
Jeff Chang, Stanford University (CA)
Alice Echols, University of Southern California (CA)
Evelyn McDonnell, Loyola Marymount University (CA)
Oliver Wang, California State University, Long Beach (CA)
Rubén Martínez, Loyola Marymount University (CA)
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Caucus: Sound Studies: The Racial Politics of Listening: “Accents,” Hate Speech, and Language in the U.S. Media
Westin Bonaventure, San Fernando (L1)
CHAIR:
Isabel Molina-Guzman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)
PAPERS:
Sara Veronica Hinojos, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)
Reading Lupe Vélez, Mexicanness, and Her Fiery “Accent”
Dolores Inés Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)
Inglés Sin Barreras, Rosetta Stone, and the Politics of Language Learning
Marci McMahon, University of Texas, Pan American (TX)
Staging the Sound of Citizenship in Josefina Lopez’s Detained in the Desert
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY)
“You. Got. To. Un. Der. Stand”: Rachel Jeantel, “Reasonable” Listening, and the Sonic Color-line
COMMENT:
Isabel Molina-Guzman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)
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To Be Young, Global, and Black: The Global Circulations of Blackness and Americanness
Westin Bonaventure, San Pedro (L1)
CHAIR:
Jeff K. Chang, Stanford University (CA)
PAPERS:
—Samir Meghelli, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)
Rapping and Race-ing Across the Atlantic: Hip Hop and Racial Politics in Postcolonial France
—H. Samy Alim, Stanford University (CA), Shaheen Ariefdien, Independent Scholar (South Africa)
Whaddup, San?: Hip Hop, “Colouredness,” and the Construction of Khoisan Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa
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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Racial Meanings and Musical Performance in Film: Uses of Folk, Calypso, and Jazz in Films, 1944–1965
Westin Bonaventure, Beaudry B (L1)
CHAIR:
Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)
PAPERS:
Geoffrey Jacques, Independent Scholar
Jazz, Film, and the Black Hipster
Shane Vogel, Indiana University–Bloomington (IN)
Trinidad Goes Hollywood: The Ersatz Epistemology of the Calypso Craze
Judith E. Smith, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA)
Using, and Being Used by Hollywood: Harry Belafonte on Film, 1953–1959
Jacqueline Stewart, University of Chicago (IL)
The Cry of Jazz and The Corner: Filming Music of Everyday Black Life in Chicago
COMMENT:
Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)
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Liberating Encounters: Cultural Consumption as Agent of Pleasure and Social Change in Contemporary Asian, Latin-American, and U.S. Popular Culture
Westin Bonaventure, San Fernando (L1)
—Patty Ahn, University of Southern California (CA)
Detours of Indebtedness: South Korean Pop Music and Neoliberal Logics of Race
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Arab Worlds: Then and Now
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Monica C (L3)
—Meghan E. Drury, George Washington University (DC)
The Belly of the Wail: Feminism and Arab Hybridity in 1990s World Music
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“Capitol Records Building” by Flickr user Wieland Van Dijk, CC BY-ND-SA 2.0
SUNDAY, November 9th
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Sports, Sex, and Music across the Pacific during the Cold War
Westin Bonaventure, Beaudry B (L1)
—Mari Yoshihara, University of Hawai’i, Manoa (HI)
Lenny Blows Up the World: Classical Musicians Play the Cold War
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Sonics of Black Excess, 1940s to 1980s
Westin Bonaventure, Los Cerritos (L1)
CHAIR:
Imani D. Owens, Princeton University (NJ)
PAPERS:
Brian Lefresne, University of Guelph Canada
A Fool in Space: Sun Ra the Jester at the Carnival
Charles McGovern, College of William and Mary (VA)
I Want a Lavender Cadillac: Fun, Excess and Labor in Black Popular Music, 1940–1970
Terrion L. Williamson, Michigan State University (MI)
I‘m Not Your Superwoman: Black Female Embodiment and the Sites of Social Intimacy
Brian Edward Jones, College of William and Mary (VA)
Big Fun with the Prince of Darkness: Miles Davis and the Death of the American Dream
COMMENT:
Imani D. Owens, Princeton University (NJ)
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
What Words Can’t Do: Instrumentals, Identity, and Interpretation
Westin Bonaventure, Los Cerritos (L1)
CHAIR:
Shana L. Redmond, University of Southern California (CA)
PANELISTS:
Shana L. Redmond, University of Southern California (CA)
Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania (PA)
Guthrie Ramsey, Jr., University of Pennsylvania (PA)
Tamara Roberts, University of California, Berkeley (CA)
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The Pleasures and Pains of Hip Hop Listening: New Aesthetic Approaches
Westin Bonaventure, San Bernardino (L1)
CHAIRS:
Jill Toliver Richardson, City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College (NY)
James Ford, Occidental College (CA)
PAPER:
Karen Jaime, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL), Jonathan Gray, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (NY), Candice Jenkins, City University of New York, Hunter College (NY), James Ford, Occidental College (CA)
The Pleasures and Pains of Hip Hop Listening: New Aesthetic Approaches
COMMENT:
Michael Jeffries, Wellesley College (MA)
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“All the Way Live”: The Aesthetics of Pleasure in California Funk
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara C (L1)
CHAIR:
Laura Harris, Pitzer College (CA)
PAPERS:
Scot Brown, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
“All the Way Live”: The Live Funk Aesthetic of Lakeside
Cheryl L. Keyes, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
From Mademoiselle Mabry to Betty Davis: The Reigning Funk Diva from the Underground
Tony Bolden, University of Kansas (KS)
Are You Funkified?: The Choreopoetics of Pleasure in the Music of Sly and the Family Stone
COMMENT:
Laura Harris, Pitzer College (CA)
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**Caucus: Environment and Culture: Ecologies of Pleasure and Pain: Deviance, Destruction, and Desire in Environmental History**
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara A (L1)
—Craig Eley, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Psychologically Ultimate Seashores: Natural Sound, Personal Pleasure, and Recording Technologies
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Pleasure, Pain, Politics, and Performance: Black Women Artists and Their Fans
Westin Bonaventure, Palos Verdes (L1)
CHAIR:
Gayle Wald, George Washington University (DC)
PANELISTS:
Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University, Newark (NJ)
Emily Lordi, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MA)
Cherise Smith, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
Gayle Wald, George Washington University (DC)
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Performative Pleasures of Blackness: The Creation, Consumption, and Conflict of Pleasureable Blacknesses
Westin Bonaventure, San Fernando (L1)
—Danielle C. Heard, University of California, Davis (CA)
Feeling Good: Nina Simone and the Pleasures of Live Performance, Montreux 1976
—Scott Poulson-Bryant, Harvard University (MA)
The ‘Unruly Delights’ of the Great Black Way: Contradiction, Pleasure and Black Musicals of the 1970s
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Can Black Women Have Fun?: Beyond Mammies and Martyrs
Westin Bonaventure, San Gabriel A (L1)
—Margo Crawford, Cornell University (NY)
Erykah Badu’s Black Fantastic Re-invigoration of Black Cultural Nationalism
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Central Avenue Breakdown: Gender, Race, and Coming of Age in a Los Angeles Jazz Community
Westin Bonaventure, Beaudry B (L1)
CHAIR:
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University (NY)
PAPERS:
Maxine Gordon, Fordham University (NY)
Dexter Gordon and Melba Liston: The ‘Mischievous Lady Session’, June 5, 1947, Dial Records
Monica Hairston-O’Connell, Columbia College (IL), Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas (KS)
Revisiting Central Avenue through Melba Liston’s Oral Histories
Nichole T. Rustin, Independent Scholar
Playing with Dynamics: Racialized Masculinity, Jazz, and Coming of Age on 1940s Central Avenue
COMMENT:
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University (NY)
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What Beyoncé (and Her Stans) Can Teach Us About The Pleasures of Intersectional Identity
Westin Bonaventure, Santa Barbara A (L1)
CHAIR:
Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
PANELISTS:
Clare Croft, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)
Micah Salkind, Brown University (RI)
Kristen Warner, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (AL)
Chelsea Bullock, University of Oregon (OR)
Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
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“DSCN9630” by Flickr user Carsten Titibach, CC BY 2.0
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SO! Reads: Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda
Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (2012) presents an alternate story of Chicana music through a collection of case studies in Chicana/o music history centering on Chicana/Tejana musicians active between the early decades of the 20th century to the present. Vargas assembles a mix of archival documents, interviews, images, songs, recordings, performances, ephemera, fragments, memories and engages intersectional feminist theory and queer of color critique to trace the music scenes her subjects inhabit.
A feminist oral historian, Chicano/Latino cultural studies scholar, and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Vargas’s research overlaps these disciplines and facilitates a conversation between popular music and sound studies that significantly considers gender, sexuality, and racialization in the construction of borderlands imaginaries. With Dissonant Divas Vargas makes an intervention both theoretical and methodological that greatly expands the Chicana/o musical archive and as well as the audiences for sound studies research. Furthermore, Vargas’s reflective writing voice locates her own Tejana/Chicana story in relation to her project and offers helpful insights into her research process at key moments. [The brief essay titled “Selena, Jenni Rivera, Eva Garza—meditations on an author’s soundtrack” published on the Minnesota Press webpages for Dissonant Divas is a generous methodology piece that should be read along with this comprehensive, satisfying, highly readable and often riveting text.]
“Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music” copyright University of Minnesota Press, all rights reserved
Vargas defines the term, la onda, in a general sense as “an umbrella term for Mexican American/Chicano/Tejano music (x).” More critically, la onda also “operates to represent musics that have been prominent in academic and cultural sites that have produced dominant discourses of sexuality, gender, class, race, geography, and language in the constructions of Chicano music.” “Dissonance” can be understood variously as “chaos, cacophany, disharmony, static” and “out-of-tuneness” that draws attention to “the power of music with regard to Chicana gender and sexuality (xiv).” Vargas’s main critique notes how the “limits of la onda” reveals the heteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings that construct dominant narratives of Chicano music historiography. She argues that the force of these narratives have naturalized a way of thinking about Chicano music in terms of the various “fathers” of Chicano rock, conjunto music, and of the field of borderland studies itself. The distortions produced by the assimilating cultural nationalist logic of “la onda” have not only suppressed Chicana music histories and/or enabled their mishearing, but they also hide the complex ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality converge to produce Chicana subjectivities within and against the Chicano musical canon. In theorizing “dissonance,” Vargas thus productively sounds the Chicana histories in Dissonant Divas as alternatively gendered and/or queered against the heteromasculine concord of la onda.
The chapter “Borders, Bullets, Besos: The Ballad of Chelo Silva” contains perhaps the most provocative pages, detailing Chelo Silva, a bolero singer with a distinct repertoire of songs that are still performed and kept alive by a diverse lineage of performers and audiences, yet whose renown is seemingly inseparable with her former marriage to Américo Paredes. Ubiquitous in borderlands studies, Paredes’s name and legacy are defined largely by his study of the corrido, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1970). Vargas strategically positions Silva and Paredes as “embodied representations” of the bolero and the border ballad, respectively, taking up Sonia Salídvar-Hull’s proposal to “imagine new corridos” by proposing Silva’s boleros as “feminist border ballads.” Vargas parses the constructions, aesthetics, and values carried in each song form, exploring how the border ballad has been the primary counter-site for narrating the injustice of Tejano/Anglo conflict (bullets) while the bolero, whose constant subject is love, luxuriates in all its jouissance (besos). Vargas reveals that the border ballad “has allowed its authors, singers, and scholars to sound the borderlands imaginary into being,” illuminating how the contest over historical representation is tied to musical representation. Silva’s story cannot be found within this articulation of la onda without, in part, redefining the border ballad (54).
Vargas innovates and meticulously crafts an alternative archive better suited to narrating and hearing Silva’s fragmented story, what Vargas felicitously calls her archisme of knowledge. Engaging the silences in Silva’s story, the archisme sounds her presence in the recorded memories of her fans which include testaments to her unique vocal qualities, her powerful and evocative performances, her improvisations in music and in life,,along with a healthy amount of the chisme or gossip surrounding Silva. Proposing the archisme as a “feminist project for historicizing nonnormative Chicana/o genders and desires” Vargas extends both Sonia Saldivar-Hull’s directive for Chicana scholars to look in nontraditional places for theory and Lisa Lowe’s theorization of gossip as a destructuring site of knowledge production (Saldivar-Hull, 1998; Lowe, 1996).
As I read through the first three chapters, a question that kept coming up concerned why we should not consider this study on more specific regional terms, or why this book isn’t titled, “Tejana Divas”? Vargas finds the overdetermination of these Chicana/Tejana musicians as “regional” subjects a problem not typically encountered by musicians from a city like Los Angeles, for example, because of its construction as a global metropolis. I cannot dispute Los Angeles’s status as a world center and I wondered how to earnestly engage Vargas on this point. What are the stakes of locating this study of Tejana/Chicana musicians within a broader Chicano/a musical context?
The final two chapters make the case for remapping Chicana music, advanced in part by the capacious notion of queer “diva-scapes.” In “Sonido de las Americas: Crossing South-South Borders with Eva Garza,” Vargas employs what she calls a “transfrontera musical compass,” a feminist methodology deftly juxtaposing the notion of a “musical scale” with the concept of “geographic scale.” Eva Garza’s career begins in her San Antonio hometown but she eventually came to embody the “la vóz de las Américas” in a hemispheric sense via her participation in early Spanish language radio, recordings, and live performances in nightclubs and films that took her to Mexico City and Havana for significant periods; her genre-crossing repertoire mirrored her travels. Garza began as a singer of the appropriately feminine bolero, but through her contact with Cuban musicians, the Afro-Caribbean guaracha song–decidedly phallocentric and risqué in its subject matter–also became part of her repertoire. The song she was most known for, “Sabor de Engaño” adds a sensual register to her transfrontera compass, a lingering sabor or taste exceeding regional, national, formal, and gendered limits. This is most evident in the repeated examples of impromptu performances of a song verse or refrain of “Sabor de Engaño” by many Cubanos Vargas encountered in her research travels. Vargas employs the transfrontera musical compass as a “listening instrument” to trace Garza’s musical trajectory through spatial-temporal moments disrupting rigid and normative notions of community, nation, and Chicano music (147).
“Selena Live” by Flickr user hellboy_93, CC BY-ND 2.0
In “Giving Us That Brown Soul: Selena’s Departures and Arrivals,” Vargas addresses the multiple problems in the mainstream media’s designation of “crossover star” to narrate Selena’s story as a spectacular rise in fame marked by her violent death in 1995. Vargas seeks to correct the assimilationist narratives of Selena’s musical history that, in addition to figuring her as a marginalized Latina on the verge of “legitimate” status, problematically narrates a south-north trajectory “devoid of blackness and queerness.” Vargas both critiques how “brown soul” has been musically deployed to stand in for cultural nationalist “brown power” and extends previous work focusing on blackness in Chicano/Latino music that includes R&B and Afro-Caribbean influences but not necessarily the Afro-diasporic. Cumbia, an Afro-Columbian dance form popularized in Mexico in the 1940’s – 50’s is central to Selena’s Tejano sound as are 70’s era disco and 80’s freestyle, particularly in the cultivation of her iconic diva look which together resonate a queer of color musical legacy on the sonic and visual planes.
Selena’s “brown soul” and style moves Tex-Mex cumbias in what Vargas calls “queer misdirections” by traveling north-south, for example, while sounding counterhegemonic femininities that continue to reverberate in the many tribute drag performances to Selena in and beyond the borderlands of Tejas. In these ways, Vargas traces the “topography of Selena’s transformations and remappings of Chicano music (205). Just as audio technologies have been key in circulating Eva Garza’s and Selena’s music in multiple directions, so are the memories, repeated performances, and queer embodiments of their music by their diverse audiences. For both of the these artists, sound expands Vargas’s engagement with spatialization theories so that we may hear these productive dissonances and in these ways begin to imagine alternative borderlands imaginaries.
Upon finishing, a question that remains in considering “diva dissonance” is the implied consonance of Vargas’s theorization of “la onda.” At times, the term becomes too totalizing, and I would argue for the presence of heterogeneity and other musical diversities even within what Vargas denotes as la onda. We must both make and leave room to imagine the possibility of many unrecorded, captured, or yet unsounded transgressions for Chicanas whose paths may appear to follow a heteronormative logic. For this reason I found the reiteration of such rich findings against la onda asomewhat repetitive distraction from the richer tales Vargas’s archival work tells. What would these histories sound like if they weren’t always positioned against la onda—if they were sounded instead more toward each other?
What Deborah R. Vargas richly accomplishes in Dissonant Divas responds to Alejandro Madrid’s call for musicologists to establish critical conversations beyond “the conservatory” and to engage larger intellectual dialogues (AMS Vol. 64, No. 3, 2011).Vargas’s intersectional feminist-of-color argument extends the body of feminist Chicana/o cultural studies scholarship and equally extends Chicano music histories that may engage gender to some degree but do not fully interrogate those categorical constructions. Her theorization of the title’s key term “dissonance” as “both a methodological and analytic device” and her construction of a differential archive combine to create “alternative sonic imaginaries of the borderlands (xii).” More broadly, Dissonant Divas is an intervention to the problems of conducting research in marginalized communities and the racialized subjects often left out of official archives, institutional records, and studies of sound (Trouillot, 1995; Taylor, 2003). Each chapter reveals and addresses various barriers to conducting research on Chicana musicians whose uneven historical representation lead Vargas to turn to other sites, methodologies, and embodied practices where Chicana voices resound across temporal and spatial lines. In these ways, Vargas’s sustained engagement of race, class, gender, and sexuality with Chicana/o borderlands music is thoroughly new.
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Featured Image: Pauline Oliveros by Flickr user Horacio González Diéguez, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Wanda Alarcón is a doctoral candidate of Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley where she is writing a dissertation titled: “Sounding Aztlán: Music, Literature, and the Chicana/o Sonic Imaginary”. Her research interests include Chicana/o cultural studies, U.S. ethnic literatures, popular music, sound studies, queer of color theory, and decolonial feminism. At Berkeley she has facilitated the working groups, “Decolonial Feminisms” and “Popular Music in Chicana/o Cultural Studies” at the Center for Race and Gender (CRG). Wanda is originally from Los Angeles and before starting graduate school she created the poetry zine, JOTA (2002 – 2006) and is updating that project by creating an archive for queer Chicana writing in cyberspace. She is a fan of radio genres and podcasts and writes micro radio plays while on the road. She is suspicious of the MP3 format yet enjoys curating party, tribute, and mood themed playlists on Spotify immensely. You can find her on Twitter depending on writing deadlines @esawanda.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
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Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?— Wanda Alarcon
Listening to the Border: “‘2487’: Giving Voice in Diaspora” and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchezˆ— Dolores Inés Casillas
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