Crawley, Ashon T. ~ Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Ch 2 “Shout” Crawley’s book theorizes Blackpentecostalism (BP) as an extra-subjective mode of being together—grounded in, and as a celebration of, the flesh. As a “way of life” (138) based on itinerancy and choreosonicity, BP is ultimately a (non)being, or, as he puts it, a “being beside oneself in the service of the other” (5). Methodologically, it is… Read More
Zadie Smith ~ Swing Time I keep coming back to Barthes’ assertion that what power imposes in the first place is a rhythm (of life, thought, discourse, time). In this book, Zadie Smith explores this idea but gives it a spin: Black people had a place and a rhythm—the TA slave trade robbed black people of them. And of course… 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