Kim Hall ~ Ch. 1 “A World of Difference” Whereas, as many postcolonialists have argued, encounters between the English and Africans/natives in the 18th and 19th century expressed a total (ontological?) othering of difference as codified by physical traits, customs, societal practices, language, etc., Hall’s analysis of the early narratives of these encounters shows that the central site of difference is gender. These 16th/17th… Read More
Kim F. Hall ~ Things of Darkness Much of Hall’s analytical work is rooted in the exploration of the material consequences of the black/white binarism that permeates the language, thought, and aesthetic constructions of Early Modern England. She maintains that the moralization of this chiaroscuro theme, and its use in the creation of gendered and class difference, remain key processes in the… Read More
Sound Studies: Epistemological Interventions (in/against …?) Cox & Crawley: As textual and discursive analyses presuppose a separation between nature and culture in the manner of Kant (Cox)—the aesthetic object separated from the knowing/judging subject: aesthetic sensibilities forged by means of a disembodiment which itself is a condition of emergence for the kind of thought processes valorized in this post-Enlightenment episteme (Crawley)—a… Read More
Eidsheim, Nina Sun ~ Sensing Sound. Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice Introduction Critique and premise and point of departure: that by a systematic reduction of the multisensoriality of sound in order to comprehend it as a unit of meaning, and the ossification of a naturally ever-shifting, relationally dependent phenomenon, we come to (reductively) apprehend music as so many “figures of sound.” Proposes that sound is “merely… Read More
Notes: My Flamenco Sub-List Part of the texts in this list will help me frame Flamenco as an object of study in order to draw a conceptual sketch of what it may mean to be (of), and know (through) Flamenco’s decolonial possibilities. Flamenco: not just an aesthetic, not just a musical modality, but also a sociopolitical phenomenon that informs… Read More
Reading List: Onto-Epistemologies of Flamenco Nation Cruces-Roldán, Cristina. “Bailes Boleros y Flamencos En Los Primeros Cortometrajes Mudos. Narrativas y Arquetipos Sobre «lo Español» En Los Albores Del Siglo XX.” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, vol. 71, no. 2, Dec. 2016, pp. 441–65. doaj.org, https://doi.org/10.3989/rdtp.2016.02.005. Llano, Samuel. “Flamenco, Flamenquismo, and Social Control.” Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid,… Read More
Notes on: Silverblatt, Irene: Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World Introduction Takes Arendt’s writings on modernity as point of departure–locating the submerged “dark currents” of western civilization, the “subterranean stream of western history” on the “road to making sense of the morally insensible.” As Foucault and Bourdieu explored the evolution of bureaucratic institutions and “art of government” (Foucault) in the 17th century, when dynastic power… Read More