Description
Book SynopsisAudible Empire's contributors rethink the mechanisms of empire, showing how musical practice has been important to its spread around the globe. The volume's fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography to put forth music as a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation.
Trade Review"'Empire,' for most of these authors, is not restrained to political empires. Instead, it entails a broad understanding of declining national sovereignty, modern capitalism, and multinational enterprises, all reflected by and in sound. That gaze alone makes this a dynamic and interesting book for historians to consult." -- Jessica Gienow-Hecht * Canadian Journal of History *
"Audible Empire is a project admirably conceived and executed, consistent in its compelling, well-written, and timely scholarship." -- Ruth E. Rosenberg * Notes *
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Audible Empire . . . offers a complex, far-reaching, and sophisticated set of perspectives for considering various constructions of empire and a wide range of sonic acts that have been and continue to be interconnected." -- Sindhumathi Revuluri * Music and Letters *
"A welcome publication, adding the subjectivity and fluidity of music, sound, and listening to an already complex network of scholarly explorations about processes of empire formation. . . . This volume brings to the foreground more than an array of perspectives on the audible aspects of empire formation; it highlights the many tensions that are involved in writing history and thinking historically, about empires and about music making in general." -- Cristina Magaldi * Journal of the Society for American Music *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Hearing Empire—Imperial Listening / Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan 1
Part I. Technologies of Circulation
1. Decolonizing the Ear: The Transcolonial Reverberations of Vernacular Phonograph Music / Michael Denning 25
2. Smoking Hot: Cigarettes, Jazz, and the Production of Global Imaginaries in Interwar Shanghai / Nan Enstad 45
3. Circuit Listening: Grace Chang and the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s / Andrew F. Jones 66
Part II. Audible Displacements
4. The Aesthetics of Allá: Listening Like a Sonidero / Josh Kun 95
5. Sound Legacy: Elsie Houston / Micol Seigel 116
6. Imperial Aurality: Jazz, the Archive, and U.S. Empire / Jairo Moreno 135
7. Where They Came From: Reracializing Music in the Empire of Silence / Philip V. Bohlman 161
Part III. Cultural Policies and Politics in the Sound Market
8. Di Eagle and di Bear: Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Cold War? / Penny Von Eschen 187
9. Currents of Revolutionary Confluence: A View from Cuba's Hip Hop Festival / Marc Perry 209
10. Tango as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Development, Diversity, and the Values of Music in Buenos Aires / Morgan James Luker 225
11. Musical Economies of the Elusive Metropolis / Gavin Steingo 246
Part IV. Anticolonialism
12. The Sound of Anticolonialism / Brent Hayes Edwards 269
13. Rap, Race, Revolution: Post-9/11 Brown and a Hip Hop Critique of Empire / Nitasha Sharma 292
14. Echo and Anthem: Representing Sound, Music, and Difference in Two Colonial Modern Novels / Amanda Weidman 314
15. Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa / Kofi Agawu 334
Discography 357
Bibliography 361
Contributors 391
Index 397
