“Welles,” Belles, and Fred Allen’s Sonic Pranks: Making a Radio Auteur Laugh at Himself
Welcome back to From Mercury to Mars, our series of posts (in conjunction with Antenna) that reflect on Orson Welles’s radio career, and the upcoming anniversary of its highlight, “The War of the Worlds.”
When scholars discuss the effect of that play on people, they often fall into reveries about its most serious dimensions — what the Martian Panic says about human susceptibility, about the power of the media, about sound and the unknown. But it’s important to realize that, besides being terribly humorless, this approach also isn’t historically just. Although Welles was — like some of his listeners — spooked the night of the event, in the days that followed he and many others came to recognize some humor in the the whole thing, too. Later in life, Welles focused on that dimension of his memory, repeatedly recalling with laughter that when the actor John Barrymore (something of a “grand old man” of the American stage in 1938), heard the Martian invasion broadcast he tearfully decided to free his beloved dogs, so they could taste freedom before meeting the inexorable doom.
Such tall tales aren’t trivial. Actually, we misunderstand the WOTW escapade if we don’t recognize that immediately adjacent to modern America’s propensity for panic stood its equally fascinating capacity to laugh at itself. Both tendencies do cultural work, often in concert with one another. With that in mind, this week our Mercury to Mars series moves from the macabre (see Debra Rae Cohen’s piece on Welles and Dracula) to the ridiculous, focusing on the relationship between Welles’s puffed-up fame and how it was lampooned by Fred Allen, one of the great absurdist comics in modern entertainment, and perhaps the most creative radio comedian of his era.
To introduce this crucial entertainer and to explain why his relationship to Welles matters so much, we are lucky to have one of the most important voices in radio studies today: Kathleen Battles, Associate Professor of Communication at Oakland University, author of a paradigm-shifting study of the relationship between radio and policing, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (Minnesota, 2010). Battles is also one of the co-editors of a book you should all be reading, assigning, and handing out like Halloween candy — War of the Worlds to Social Media: Mediated Communication in Times of Crisis (Peter Lang, 2013).
Here’s a taste, just to get you started.
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Contemporary public memory of Orson Welles seems bent on remembering him as mercurial, imperious, haughty genius, driven in equal parts by ambition and artistic vision. It is hard to remember that this image of the auteur – not Welles but “Welles” – was one crafted not by the man alone, but by a host of actors and other performers, all with their own interest in attaching themselves to such a “genius.” As Welles’s reputation grew in the wake of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, furthering his transformation into “Welles,” it was simply a matter of time before he became a fodder for another kind of auteur, the radio comedian. One of the most popular was Fred Allen, who made a career archly satirizing the cultural conventions of the day, with the radio industry itself being one of his favorite targets. “Welles” was too rich a subject to forego.
This post explores two key moments of Allen’s satire. The first came on November 9, 1939, when Allen’s show featured a comic skit, entitled “The Soundman’s Revenge, or, He Only Pulled the Trigger a Little, Because the Leading Man was Half Shot Anyway,” a radio skit that deftly mimes the Mercury/Campbell style to comic effect. The second is from three years later, October 18, 1942, when Welles himself appeared on Allen’s show, joining in the fun as the pair rehearse Les Miserables, with Welles gamely mocking “Welles.” In these two short skits, Allen and his team of writers and performers quickly dismantle what had become the more recognizable elements of the Mercury/Campbell style–as exemplified in Welles’s version of A Tale of Two Cities–including the elevation of Welles to the genius “author” of the plays, its narrative and performance techniques, and the use of sound effects.
Orson Welles as Mr. Arkadin in his film of the same name, 1955.
Mercury Theater was strongly marked with the authorial imprint of the real Welles, but the legend of “Orson Welles” was also crafted quite deliberately by CBS, and then later by show sponsor Campbell’s Soup, for their own aims at cultural legitimacy. As Michele Hilmes argued, such moves were key to legitimizing the medium as operating in the “public interest” (183-88). Here is a clip from just after Campbell Soup began sponsoring the Welles program:
As other writers have pointed out, such as Debra Rae Cohen in her entry to this series, Neil Verma, and Paul Heyer, the show was among the best in emphasizing the sonic properties of radio to maximum effect in storytelling. The quality acting of members of the Mercury Theater, the music of Bernard Herrmann, the ambitious use of sound effects, and some stellar examples of adapting literary tales make the show worthy of praise.
The emotional and narrative power of Welles himself is evident in the Mercury Theater dramatization of A Tale of Two Cities. Taking on Dickens’ sprawling classic in one hour certainly demanded some creative choices. One was to open with Dr. Mannette’s letter from the Bastille prison, with Welles as Mannette emotionally dictating the words that would later serve to betray his own family.
This is contrasted against the later reading of the same letter in a courtroom scene, where the emotional poignancy of Welles’s performance is counterpointed against its dry reading as a piece of evidence.
The sound effects team from The March of Time in a 1930’s publicity photo. On the left is Ora Nichols, who would later develop sounds for The War of the Worlds.
Dynamic use of sound effects was another key element of the Mercury/Campbell style. From his work in March of Time and The Shadow, which both used sound effects to enact key narrative devices (Time varied times and locations, the Shadow’s invisibility), Welles used his own radio program to push the boundaries of what such effects could achieve. In A Tale of Two Cities, sound effects are used to punctuate key moments, none to greater effect than the final scene in which the sound of the guillotine serves as the morbid backdrop to Carton’s final, famous speech of self sacrifice:
Cover art for “Fred Allen Looks at Life,” a 1971 vinyl release by Bagdad Records.
All of these tendencies are key to Allen’s “Soundman’s Revenge,” in which Orson Welles and the Campbell’s Playhouse become “Dorson Belles” and “Finnegan’s Playhouse,” with the evening’s entertainment an adaptation of Jack and Jill fetching a pail of water.
Belles, acted by Fred Allen, tells his listeners that “My program is famous, and rightly so, for my sound effects, conceived in solitude by me.” The skit reaches ridiculous heights during a dramatization of “Jack’s” first meeting with “Jill.” As Jack and Jill wax enthusiastically at each other merely by repeating each others’ names, the host breaks in to tell listeners that “This dialogue, ladies and gentleman, is not to be found in the original Mother Goose version. It has been interprellated by Dorson Belles. We return you now to the play.”
The always potential high culture pretentiousness of Mercury/Campbell aesthetic choices are brought to the fore by the ridiculous choice of a Mother Goose nursery rhyme as the “play” within the skit. But other things do as well. The skit opens in typical Mercury first person narrative style, where Jack tells the tale from his own perspective in a ponderous, overwrought dramatic fashion. Jack does not live in postcard ready New England, he lives in a “land of penury and misery.” He does not merely make a mess while preparing his dinner, but “licks the albumen of owl’s egg off his fingers.”’
In its most pointed reference to Mercury style, the skit directly plays off a memorable moment in War of the Worlds when, as Professor Pierson narrates his travels in New Jersey, he states that “I saw something crouching in a doorway, and it rose up and became a man. A man armed with a large knife.” Here is the clip:
In similar dramatic style, Jack narrates his journey up the hill, hauling his “heavy oaken pail” and asks “What was that huddled form crouching in my path? Was it a girl? It was!”
The comic tour-de-force, however, comes with its satire of sound effects. Allen’s team goes for broke as listeners laugh along to the gradual undoing of the hapless Theodore Slade, Welles’s sound effects engineer in the skit, who is driven to madness by the excessive number of effects. Slade makes many mistakes throughout, but his errors really add up when Jack kills his father and he describes the “long arm of the law” reaching out, coming from the north on horseback, the east by train, the west by “aeroplane,” and the north by sleigh. Each description is punctuated by its appropriate sound; hooves, whistles, engines, and of course, sleigh bells.
It works the first time, but when Jack dramatically asks if he and Jill can escape each of these modes of capture, Slade plays the wrong effects. When Jack tells us he stabbed the Sherriff, Slade plays a gunshot. This time, when Belles chastises him, Slade lets loose, telling Belles that he is going “nuts,” then trying to rectify the mistake by killing the Sherriff again. Belles yells out that “this is confusing!” to which Slade retorts, “you’re telling me!” As Jill tries to continue the scene, telling us she is shooting herself, Slade plays the train whistle. Finally Jack narrates that Jill, the Sherriff, and his father are dead, and that “I alone live.” Slade replies, “yeah, but not for long,” and after listing off years worth of complaints, shoots Belles. Belles, in a pitch perfect rendition of Welles’s weekly closing of his radio show, says “This is Dorson Belles, signing off permanently. Pending rigor mortis, I remain, obediently yours.”
Fred Allen on the cover of Time, April 7, 1947. Art by Ernest Hamlin Baker.
Perhaps Welles was offended, or perhaps he yearned to be in on the joke. He certainly seemed to relish the chance for that opportunity, when he appeared as a guest on Allen’s show, 3 years later on October 18, 1942. Here he plays along in the skewering of his own genius image, tied to his authorial control over all his projects. As the cast nervously awaits the arrival of the great “Welles,” Allen tries to calm them. Once “Welles” enters the studio, Allen himself comes in for his own ribbing. “Welles” tells him that they will be performing a new version of one of Welles’s early radio dramatizations, Les Miserables. Here Welles successfully mocks both “Welles” and Allen, insisting on sole authorship, giving an overwrought performance, using the first person singular mode of delivery, and most humorously by reducing Allen’s contribution to a few sound effects.
In those few moments where Welles himself cannot help from laughing along with the mockery, “Welles” becomes Welles, and we in the audience get to laugh with, not at, the man.
While CBS, Campbell Soup, and the press turned Welles into “Welles,” Allen undermined that move, puncturing the grandiose myth, a project in which Welles himself was only too willing to participate. By breaking it down to its constituent elements, the “Soundman” and Les Miserables skits celebrate the unique style of the Mercury/Campbell radio productions. Yet, they also pierce its cultured veneer by pointing to the unsung efforts of the always-necessary team to make radio performances work, and skewering the pretentiousness of the program’s extra-textual discourses. In the process Welles and Allen mutually constructed and deflated each other’s reputation as radio geniuses.
Orson Welles as Falstaff in his Chimes at Midnight, 1965.
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Featured Image: Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins sharing a laugh on the set of The Trial.
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Kathleen Battles is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Oakland University (MI not CA). She is recently co-editor (with Joy Hayes and Wendy Hilton-Morrow) of War of the Worlds to Social Media: Mediated Communication in Times of Crisis (Peter Lang, 2013), a volume that seeks to draw connections between the War of the Worlds broadcast event and contemporary issues surrounding new media. She is also the author Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Her research interests include Depression era radio cultures, the interrelationship between radio, telephones, and automobiles, media and space/time, the historical continuities between “old” and “new” media, and contemporary issues surrounding sexuality and the media.
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Want to catch up on the Mercury to Mars series?
Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work.
Click here to read Eleanor Patterson’s reflections on recorded re-releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.
Click here to read Debra Rae Cohen’s thoughts on vampire media in Orson Welles’s “Dracula.”
And click here to read Cynthia B. Meyers on the challenges and rewards of teaching WOTW in the classroom.
While I’ve still got you here … be sure to join our WOTW anniversary Facebook group. Next month we’re planning exciting events around the anniversary of the Martian Panic on October 30, 2013 from 7-10 EST, and hoping to get as many of you as we can to liveTweet the Invasion broadcast. Sign up to join in!
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Sound at ASA 2012
This year, #ASA2012 is being held in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Puerto Rico Convention Center from November 15-18. San Juan provides a historic opportunity for the interdisciplinary scholars working under the banner of “American Studies” to ponder the theme, “Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future,” from a site that has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States since it was seized from Spain (its former imperial occupiers) after the Spanish American War in 1898. According to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Insular Cases an “unincorporated territory” is “a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.” Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, despite not having voting representatives in Washington D.C. and being unable to vote in mainland presidential elections. Just a few days ago, Puerto Ricans voted on yet another referendum to become a state—there have been 3 such votes, one in 1967, 1993, and 1998, but this is the first where statehood won a majority of the votes—an issue that both U.S. presidential candidates were all but silent on in their recent campaigns. This vote suggests a sea change in Puerto Rican-U.S. relations–what an exciting time to hold ASA in San Juan!–and I’d also like to think this particular meeting portends an exciting shift in sound studies as well.
For one thing, sound studies scholars in particular will be discussing power and imperialism loudly and clearly at this meeting. Sounding Out!’s Managing Editor, Liana Silva, will be participating in a roundtable at 8:00 a.m Sunday morning entitled “Doing Disciplinarity: Puerto Rican Studies is/as/with American Studies” where she, along with Marta S. Rivera Monclova (Framingham State College), Leonardo L. Flores Feliciano (University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez), and Sara Poggio (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) will discuss the fraught relationship between the two fields of study, particularly in relation to America’s imperial history.
And then, the fully signed-sealed-and delivered ASA Sound Studies Caucus hosts two official panels that explicitly consider the politics of sound and listening. The first is on on Friday from 4:00-5:45: “Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire” chaired by Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas) and featuring the research of Marci McMahon (University of Texas, Pan American), Genevieve Yue (University of Southern California and yours truly, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (SUNY Binghamton); and the second on Saturday from 4:00-5:45: “Sound and the State: The Politics of Acoustic Power” chaired by Jonathan Sterne (McGill University) and featuring the research of David Suisman (University of Delaware) and Peter Tschirhart (University of Virginia) with a comment by Mara Mills (New York University). From the racial dynamics of postwar New York City’s noise laws to “Noise Exposure Maps,” Sonic Booms to the technics of female silence, ASA’s sound studies scholars continue the sociopolitical interventions of last year’s “Sound Clash: Listening to America Studies” special issue of American Quarterly. This issue, edited by Josh Kun and Kara Keeling, explicitly focused on issues of race, gender, class sexuality, and nation (by the way, if you misplaced your copy, Johns Hopkins press has just released the issue in book volume form).
The Sound Studies Caucus also continues its very important organizational role this year by bringing scholars together for its second annual Sound Studies Caucus Meet-and-Greet, which will be co-hosted by none other than Sounding Out! !!! We have been thrilled to work with co-organizers Inés Casillas (UCSB), Roshanak Kheshti (UCSD) and Deb Vargas (UCR) to plan a get together at the District Bar of the nearby Sheraton (200 Convention Way, 787-993-3500, Map) where we will solicit volunteers and chat about the activities of the caucus this year and next. Sounding Out! will be officially welcoming the members of its new advisory board at the meet-and-greet, as well as sharing details about current and future Calls for Posts, and pumping up the crowd for what’s ahead in the blog for 2013. If you are in San Juan for the conference, please join us!
“Grupo Mania and My Puerto Rican Flag,” by Flickr User Photo Prodigy
Overall, while sound studies work is somewhat lighter than in years past—a trend I also noted at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting earlier this year—the research on sound, listening, and aurality at this year’s #ASA2012 is, more than ever before, focused on questions of race, gender, and sexuality in ways that, as Keeling and Kun stated in their introduction to Sound Clash: “can enable an interdisciplinary American studies in which knowledges and insights that have not been perceptible to our dominant intellectual paradigms might be heard or heard anew” (453). I am particularly enthused about what promises to be excellent new research in African American Studies—especially the panels “Ask Your Mama: The Sound(ed) Poetics and Politics of Black Feminist Internationalism” (Saturday, 12:00-1:45) and “Blackness and the Sacred Performative” (Thursday 4:00-5:45, featuring SO! writer Ashon Crawley [Duke]—and Chican@/Latino Studies—notably roundtables on “The Talking Cure for Empire? Oral History and Testimonio in the Twenty-first Century” (Friday, 10:00-11:45) and “Subjectivity and Sound: Rethinking Genre in Chicano/a Music” (Friday, 2:00-3:45). There are also multiple panels that elicit transnational conversations about audio culture—“Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire” (Friday 4:00-5:45) and “Jazz and the Voices of Empire and Resistance” in particular (Saturday, 10:00-11:45)—and enable transmedia comparisons—especially “Terrains of Modernity, Aural Research, and Critique” (Sunday, 2:00-3:45).
Whereas the downturn in sound studies work at SCMS 2012 was due primarily to a scheduling snafu—doublebooked with the 2012 EMP—I think the ASA’s is perhaps due to the beginnings of a sea change (a new wave?) in sound studies. It is certainly not attributable to a lack of interest or scholarship—the emails I get for Sounding Out! alone can attest to growing numbers of truly enthusiastic scholars working on sound and listening—therefore, I put forth that sound studies is entering a moment of reflection. It is no longer enough to breathlessly sound out new sonic terrain; we are moving beyond the period when sound alone could be the binding theme in a conference panel. The work is getting more nuanced, robust sub-fields are developing—voice studies, for example—vocabularies are becoming shared, and more than ever, scholars are engaging with each other’s work on a deeper level, complicating and texturing the just-established histories, narratives, and canons of the field. Whereas Michele Hilmes’s foundational 2005 review essay in American Quarterly “Is there a Thing Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does it Matter?” noted that “various venues of academic work on sound phenomena so rarely speak to or take heed of each other” (252), I noted no fewer than twelve sound-related roundtables at #ASA2012 where scholars will be doing the difficult-but-rewarding work of acknowledging conflicts, hashing out shared interests, and forging what comes next. Please take good notes, sound studies folks, because ASA has enacted an official ban on recording:
The papers and commentaries presented during this meeting are intended solely for the hearing of those present and should not be tape-recorded, copied, or otherwise reproduced without the consent of the authors. Recording, copying, or reproducing a paper/presentation without the consent of the author(s) may be a violation of common law copyright and may result in legal difficulties for the person recording, copying, or reproducing (ASA Program PDF, 17).
Unfortunately, this means that the 2012 sound roundtables will be one-time-only, be-there-or-be-square affairs. But as we know from so much research in our vibrant field, even while the vocal grains and tones will fade away into the air of San Juan, these unscripted scholarly performances can’t help but have lasting reverberations.
The Liner Notes for the ASA Sound Studies Caucus “Cassette” Flyer. This and Featured Image by Frank Bridges, fbridges@eden.rutgers.edu
Scroll down for the sound-related conference listings. For the virtual experience, look for my live tweets via our Facebook and Twitter pages, Liana Silva’s live tweets (@literarychica) or on the official ASA backchannel: #ASA2012. Please comment to let SO! know what you think–both before and after ASA 2012. Finally, 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 former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2011-2012).
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Jump to THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
Jump to FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012
Jump to SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012
Jump to SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012
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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
THURSDAY, November 15, 2012
10:00 am – 11:45 am
007. Crimson and Clover: Hope and Dread in the Musical Countercultures of the 1960s
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102C
CHAIR: Eric Avila, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
PAPERS: Rachel Rubin, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA), “I Think That Maybe I’m Dreaming: Music, Counterculture, and the Renaissance Pleasure Faire”
Andrew Green Hannon, Yale University (CT), “Huey Digs Bob Dylan: The Black Panthers, Highway 61 Revisited, and Making Revolutionary Meaning”
Jeffrey Melnick, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA), “The Ballad of Terry Melcher: Famous and Rising Sons in the LA Counterculture”
Will Spires, Santa Rosa Junior College (CA), “The Musical Holdouts of Colby Street: Formation and Legacy of an Old Time Music Community”
COMMENT: Eric Avila, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Shane Vogel, Indiana University–Bloomington (IN), “Being a Fad: Black Performance and the Calypso Craze,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
031. Invisible Structures and the Experience of Music
Puerto Rico Convention Center 103B
CHAIR: Lisa Brawley, Vassar College (NY)
PAPERS: Carlo Rotella, Boston College (MA), “The Home of the Blues”
Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama, Birmingham (AL), “Structuring the Eclectic: Radio and Entertainment Formats (Not Genres)”
Hua Hsu, Vassar College (NY), “Sounds of Confusion: H. T. Tsiang and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Protest Music”
COMMENT: Lisa Brawley, Vassar College (NY)
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037. Blogging as Public Pedagogy: A Roundtable with GayProf, Historiann, Roxie, and Tenured Radical
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202B
CHAIR: Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
PANELISTS: Marilee Lindemann, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
Ann Little, Colorado State University (CO)
Anthony Mora, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)
Claire Bond Potter, New School University (NY)
Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Jack Hamilton, Harvard University (MA), “House Burning Down: Jimi Hendrix, Race, and the Limits of Sixties Music,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, University of Pennsylvania (PA), “Feeling Colors and Seeing Speech: Black Women’s Choreopoetic Diasporas of Difference,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209C
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Nadja Millner-Larsen, “Black Synaesthesia: The Anarcho-Aesthetics of Black Mask,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B
Mary Beltrán, University of Texas, Austin (TX), “Blacking Up for Laughs: Televisual Blackface and ‘Post-Racial’ Cultural Memory,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 208B
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
077. Blackness and the Sacred Performative
Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A
CHAIR: Michelle D. Commander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (TN)
PAPERS: Amey Victoria Adkins, Duke University (NC), “‘Ain’t I A Woman’: Black Madonnas, Mammys, and the Performative Aesthetics of Darkness”
Ashon Crawley, Duke University (NC), “Breathing Towards Lynching Critique: Whooping in Black Pentecostal Praying and Preaching”
Terrion L. Williamson, Michigan State University (MI), “Black Sacred Dance and the Reverberations of Christian Sexuality”
COMMENT: Johari Jabir, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Molly McGlennen, Vassar College (NY), “Re-imagining “Domestic Dependency”: The Transnational Motivations of Rebecca Belmore’s Sound Performances,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209C
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Memorial to Salsa Composer Catalino (Tite) Curet Alonso (1926-2003) in the Plaza de Armas, Image by Flickr User roger4336
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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012
8:00 am – 9:45 am
105. Mixtape Logics: Listening to Empire and Resistance
Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B
CHAIR: Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, University of Southern California (CA)
PANELISTS: Priya Jha, University of Redlands (CA)
Van Truong, Yale University (CT)
Chris Nielsen, University of Pittsburgh (PA)
COMMENT: Joshua Guild, Princeton University (NJ)
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108. Caucus: Digital Humanities: What Can the Digital Humanities Bring to American Studies, and Vice Versa?
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A
CHAIR: Susan Garfinkel, Library of Congress (DC)
PANELISTS: Natalia Cecire, Yale University (CT)
Alex Gil, University of Virginia (VA)
Matthew K. Gold, City University of New York, Graduate School (NY)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Modern Language Association (NY)
Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology (GA)
Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
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117. Performance as Power and Critique: Social Change in African Diasporic Performance
Puerto Rico Convention Center 208C
CHAIR: Jennifer Devere Brody, Stanford University (CA)
PAPERS: Tisha Brooks, Tufts University (MA) ,“Performing Power and Privilege: The Spiritual Itinerant Practice of Amanda Berry Smith”
Shanesha R. F. Brooks-Tatum, Interdenominational Theological Center (GA), “Sonic Bridges: Conversion Narratives in Diasporic Christian Hip-Hop Performance”
Tanya Saunders, Lehigh University (PA), “Global Hip Hop, Black Feminism, and the Queer of Color Critique: An Analysis of Women-Centered Arts-Based Activism in Cuba and Brazil”
Lori Lynne Brooks, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), “It’s Empire Time!: Black Popular Performance and the Temporality of Imperialism”
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
125. The Talking Cure for Empire? Oral History and Testimonio in the Twenty-first Century
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B
CHAIR: Theresa Delgadillo, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH)
PANELISTS: Tami Albin, University of Kansas (KS)
Maylei Blackwell, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
Thuy Vo Dang, University of California, Irvine (CA)
Theresa Delgadillo, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH)
Linda Garcia Merchant, Artist
Joseph Rodríguez, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (WI)
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)
Janet Weaver, University of Iowa (IA)
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127. ASA Program Committee: Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Speculation, Futurity, New Materialisms
Puerto Rico Convention Center 103A
CHAIR: Tavia Nyong’o, New York University (NY)
PANELISTS: Jayna Brown, University of California, Riverside (CA)
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University (NY)
Dana Luciano, Georgetown University (DC)
José Esteban Muñoz, New York University (NY)
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131. Caucus: Science and Technology: What is the Future of Technology in American Studies?: A Roundtable
Puerto Rico Convention Center 104C
CHAIR: Jason Weems, University of California, Riverside (CA)
PANELISTS: Carolyn de la Pena, University of California, Davis (CA)
Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)
Joshua Shannon, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
Elena Razlogova, Concordia University (Canada)
Joel Dinerstein, Tulane University (LA)
COMMENT: Jason Weems, University of California, Riverside (CA)
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133. Caucus: Digital Humanities: Digital Shorts: New Platforms of Knowledge Production and Resistance
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A
CHAIR: A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester (NY)
PANELISTS: Susan Smulyan, Brown University (RI)
Stewart Varner, Emory University (GA)
A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester (NY)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Thomas George Sowders, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (LA), Puerto Rico Convention Center 208C, “Martin Delany’s Sonic Transnationalism: Genres of Poetry and Sound in Blake; or, the Huts of America”
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
146. Ask Your Mama: The Sound(ed) Poetics and Politics of Black Feminist Internationalism
Puerto Rico Convention Center 101A
CHAIR: Farah Griffin, Columbia University (NY)
PAPERS: Daphne Ann Brooks, Princeton University (NJ), “‘A Woman is a Sometime Thing’: Leontyne and Sarah’s Sonic Temporalities’
Salamishah Tillet, University of Pennsylvania (PA), “Hush and Listen: Mama Africa and Nina Simone’s Global Civil Rights Sound”
Imani Perry, Princeton University (NJ), “Sounding Like a Movement: The Advance of Miriam Makeba’s Retreat Song”
COMMENT: Farah Griffin, Columbia University (NY)
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
168. Business Meeting of the Digital Humanities Caucus
Puerto Rico Convention Center Foyer A
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
182. ASA Committee on Graduate Education: Digital Dimensions of Graduate Education in American Studies (co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus and ASA Students’ Committee)
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A
CHAIR: Robert W. Snyder, Rutgers University, Newark (NJ)
PANELISTS: Clarissa J. Ceglio, Brown University (RI)
Douglas Lambert, State University of New York, Buffalo (NY)
Sharon Leon, George Mason University (VA)
John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California (CA)
Stephen Brier, City University of New York, Graduate School (NY)
187. Subjectivity and Sound: Rethinking Genre in Chicano/a Music
Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A
CHAIR: Tyina Steptoe, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)
PANELISTS: Anthony Macias, University of California, Riverside (CA)
Marie Miranda, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)
Michelle Habell-Pallan, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Marisol Negrón, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Fania Records, Intellectual Property Rights, and Royalties,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B
Isabel Porras, University of California, Davis (CA) “Hypersexual and Excessive: Carmen Miranda and Sofia Vergara and Performing Latinidad,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 203
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
208. Caucus: Sound Studies: Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire
Puerto Rico Convention Center 204
CHAIR: Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas (KS)
PAPERS: Marci McMahon, University of Texas, Pan American (TX), “Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar: Staging Soundscapes of Silence and Imperialism”
Genevieve Yue, University of Southern California (CA), “Technics of Female Silence”
Jennifer Lynn Stoever-Ackerman, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY), “‘Just Be Quiet Pu-leeze’: New York’s Black Press Fights the Postwar ‘Campaign Against Noise’
COMMENT: Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas (KS)
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213. I’m a MuthaFking Monster: Alter Egos, New Media, and Black/Queer Performativity
Puerto Rico Convention Center 209B
CHAIR: Gabriel Peoples, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)
PAPERS: Treva Lindsey, University of Missouri, Columbia (MO), “I Am… Sasha Fierce: Resistive Alterity and African American Respectability Politics”
Uri McMillan, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), “Gone Campin’: The Campy Paradox of Nicki Minaj”
Kismet Nunez / Jessica Marie Johnson, University of Maryland, College Park (MD), “On Alter Egos and Infinite Literacies, Part 2 (An #AntiJemimas Imperative)”
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Omi/Joni Jones, University of Texas, Austin (TX); Sharon Bridgforth, DePaul University (IL), “Conjuring Jazz”
Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, San Juan, Puerto Rico, by Flickr User Jorge Rodriquez
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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012
8:00 am – 9:45 am
237. Empires of Funk: U.S. Colonialism, Filipina/o Resistance, and Hip Hop
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A
CHAIR: Victor Hugo Viesca, California State University, Los Angeles (CA)
PAPERS: Mark Villegas, University of California, Irvine (CA), “From Indios to Morenos: Exploring the Poetics and Memory of Postcolonial Racial Positioning”
Lorenzo Perillo, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), “Maganda at Malakas: Gendered Choreographies in Manila”
Roderick Labrador, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, (HI) “Agitation Propaganda: Toward a Filipina/o Revolutionary Internationalism”
COMMENT: Brian Chung, University of Notre Dame (IN)
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242. Aesthetics in the Belly of the Beast: Reading American Carceral Art
Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A
CHAIR: Doran Larson, Hamilton College (NY)
PAPERS: Alessandro Porco, State University of New York, Buffalo (NY), “The ‘And’ After Every Sentence: Hip-Hop, Incarceration, and Creativity”
Imani Kai Johnson, New York University (NY), “B-Boying Behind Bars: A Profile of Batch from The Bronx Boys Rocking Crew”
Marcella Runell Hall, New York University (NY), “Assessment Data on ‘Lyrics from Lockdown,’”
COMMENT: Doran Larson, Hamilton College (NY)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Sarah Perkins, Stanford University (CA), “‘Bound to trabble’: The Circulation of ‘Dixie,’ 1880–1910,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 201A
Nicholas Bauch, California State University, Los Angeles (CA), “Practicing Geography Through Art Performance: Urban Interventions and the Renaissance of the Vernacular,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209B
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
263. ASA Program Committee: Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Language Ideologies, Spanish in the U.S., and Latinidad
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202B
CHAIR: Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego (CA)
PAPERS: Lourdes Maria Torres, DePaul University (IL), “Spanish in Chicago: Dialects in Contact”
Jonathan Daniel Rosa, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MA), “Racializing Language, Regimenting Latinidad:Latina/o Ethnolinguistic Emblems in Diasporic Perspective”
Lillian Gorman, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL). “The (New) Mexican Familia: Ethnolinguistic Contact Zones in Northern New Mexico”
COMMENT: Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego (CA)
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
278. Black Independent Cinema Before and After Pariah
Puerto Rico Convention Center 101B
CHAIR: Kara Keeling, University of Southern California (CA)
PANELISTS: Jennifer DeClue, University of Southern California (CA)
Yvonne Welbon, Bennett College (NC)
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Northwestern University (IL)
Roya Z. Rastegar, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
Kara Keeling, University of Southern California (CA)
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287. West Side Story: A Roundtable Discussion
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A
CHAIR: Julia Foulkes, New School University (NY)
PANELISTS: Julia Foulkes, New School University (NY)
Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, Mount Holyoke College (MA)
Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
Elizabeth Wells, Mt. Allison University (Canada)
Brian Eugenio Herrera, Princeton University (NJ)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Rashida K. Braggs, Williams College (MA), “From Limited to Alternate Citizenship: How Image and Song Perform Historical Resistance in Bayou,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
2nd Annual Sound Studies Meet and Greet! Co-Sponsored by the ASA Sound Studies Caucus and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog
The District Bar
SHERATON PUERTO RICO HOTEL & CASINO
200 Convention Center Boulevard, San Juan, PR 00907
Cash Bar
Appetizers! Drink Specials! VIP area!
303. Musical Movements
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B
CHAIR: Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)
PAPERS: John Cline, University of Texas, Austin (TX), “Familiar Islands: The U.S., the Bahamas, and the Permeable Boundaries of ‘Folk’ Music”
Mikiko Tachi, Chiba University (Japan), “Folk Music and the Racial Imaginary in the U.S. and Japan”
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Stanford University (CA), “‘I need another world’: Queer Singer-Songwriters in Transnational Collaboration Post-9/11”
COMMENT: Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)
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314. Re-thinking Red, Yellow, Black, and Chicana/o Power through Oral History
Puerto Rico Convention Center 204
CHAIR: Rhonda Williams, Case Western Reserve University(OH)
PAPERS: Lorena Oropeza, University of California, Davis (CA), “He Said, She Said, But Who’s Right?: Oral History Unlocks Anti-Colonialism in 1960s New Mexico”
May Fu, University of San Diego (CA), “Oral History and the Asian American Radical Tradition”
Elizabeth Castle, University of South Dakota (SD), “Talking Back: Native Women’s Oral Histories in the Red Power Movement”
Lauren Araiza, Denison University (OH), “Oral Histories and Multiracial Coalitions in the UFW and the Black Freedom Struggle”
COMMENT: Rhonda Williams, Case Western Reserve University, (OH)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Rachel Donaldson, Vanderbilt University (TN), “Seeking the ‘Sensual’ and the ‘Significant’: Alan Lomax in Haiti”
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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
325. Chavela Vargas, La Bamba, and Morrissey: Mapping Queer Musical Diasporas and Desires
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102A
CHAIR: Stacy Macias, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
PAPERS: J. Frank Galarte, University of Arizona (AZ), “‘Que soy muy canalla dice la gente’: The Pleasure of Queer Love, Desire, and Dolor in Chavela Vargas’ Repertoire”
Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, Mount Holyoke College (MA), “Yo también quiero bailar la bamba”: The Policing of Gender in the Chicana/o Son Jarocho Diaspora”
Melissa Hidalgo, Pitzer College (CA), “Complicated Colonial Legacies: Mapping the Queer Chicano Contours of Morrissey’s Los Angeles Fanscape in “Gay Vatos in Love”
COMMENT: Stacy Macias, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
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326. Marginal Digital Knowledges: A Workshop on Technology, Transformation, and Resistance
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B
CHAIR: Tara McPherson, University of Southern California (CA)
PANELISTS: Simone A. Browne, University of Texas, Austin (TX)
Fiona Barnett, Duke University (NC)
Amanda Phillips, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)
Tanner Higgin, University of California, Riverside (CA)
Moya Bailey, Emory University (GA)
Alexis Lothian, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (PA)
327. Caucus: Sound Studies: Sound and the State: The Politics of Acoustic Power
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102C
CHAIR: Jonathan Sterne, McGill University (Canada)
PAPERS: David Suisman, University of Delaware (DE), “Shock Wave Politics: The Battle Over Sonic Booms”
Peter Tschirhart, University of Virginia (VA), “Part 150 ‘Noise Exposure Maps’ and the Closing of the Acoustic Commons”
COMMENT: Mara Mills, New York University (NY)
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329. Between Island and Diaspora: Locating, Creating, and Performing Afro–Puerto Rican Bomba
Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A
MODERATOR: Tamara Roberts, University of California, Berkeley (CA)
This roundtable brings together bomba practitioners, cultural workers, and scholars from Puerto Rico and California. Rafael Maya and Pablo Luis Rivera will discuss their work as the founders of Proyecto Unión and Restauración Cultural. Sarazeta Ragazzi, Tamara Roberts, and Denise Solis will detail their work in the all-women’s performance ensemble Las Bomberas de la Bahia (San Francisco Bay Area). And Jade Power Sotomayor will extend the discussion of cross-cultural connections byconsidering the large Chicano participation in the form in the U.S., underscoring the ways that Latinidad and more specifically, Afro-Latinidad are corporeally articulated through this embodied practice.
Congas, Image courtesy of Flickr User Richard Alexander Caraballo
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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012
8:00 am – 9:45 am
365. Doing Disciplinarity: Puerto Rican Studies is/as/withAmerican Studies
Puerto Rico Convention Center 204
CHAIR: Marta S. Rivera Monclova, Framingham State College (MA)
PANELISTS: Marta S. Rivera Monclova, Framingham State College (MA)
Liana Marie Silva, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY)
Leonardo L. Flores Feliciano, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez (PR)
Sara Poggio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (MD)
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Nadia Ellis, University of California, Berkeley (CA), “Dancehall’s Urban Possessions,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 101A
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10:00 am – 11:45 am
377. Jazz and the Voices of Empire and Resistance
Puerto Rico Convention Center 102A
CHAIR: John Gennari, University of Vermont (VT)
PAPERS: Daniel Stein, University of Goettingen (Germany), “Onkel Satchmo Behind the Iron Curtain: The Politics of Louis Armstrong’s Visit to East Germany”
Elliott H. Powell, New York University (NY), “Solidarity in Sound: John Coltrane, Indian Music, and Global Freedom Struggles”
Matthew B. Karush, George Mason University (VA), “Transnational Routes: Argentine Encounters with Jazz, 1959–1972”
COMMENT: John Gennari, University of Vermont (VT)
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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Daphne Lamothe, Smith College (MA), “Trauma, Silence, and the Language of Resistance in Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying”
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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Imani D. Owens, Columbia University (NY), “The Politics of Sound: Race, Space, and Cuban Identity in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209A
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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
420. Terrains of Modernity, Aural Research, and Critique
Puerto Rico Convention Center 104C
CHAIR: Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)
PAPERS: Art Blake, Ryerson University (Canada), “John Cage’s Voice and New York’s Postwar Urban Sensorium”
Derek Vaillant, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), “The Power of Piaf: Racial Formation and Nostalgia in Postwar U.S.-France Aural Culture”
Jason Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (MD), “Radio Localism 2.0”
Benjamin Aslinger, Bentley College (MA), “Listening In to Web 2.0: Subjectivity, Alterity, and Power”
COMMENT: Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)
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423. Los Nombres: Puerto Rican Popular Music in Lorain, Ohio
Puerto Rico Convention Center 202C
CHAIR: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA)
PANELISTS: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA)
Eugene Rivera, Jr., Independent Scholar
José Pepe Rivera, Sr., Artist
..
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:
Mike Amezcua, Northwestern University (IL), “Brown Bop: Mexican American Jazzmen, Race, and the Quest for a Transnational Jazz Movement”
San Juan, Puerto Rico, Image courtesy of Ricymar Fine Art Photography
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