Conference Agenda

How has listening mediated urban transformations and their representation in inter-imperial modernity? In a recent JAMS article, Jacob Olley analyzes a seventeenth-century literary depiction of a musical gathering at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, “listen[ing] to the way others listen, the way they inscribe their own listening practices'' to gain insight into relationships between textuality, aurality, imperial power, and epistemology (Olley 2023). Where Olley takes early modern Istanbul as a site at which to listen beyond postcolonial bifurcations and Western representations, Istanbul elites in more recent centuries have often been keenly concerned with listening to and being heard by Western imperial powers. In this paper, I put Olley’s focus on listening and inscription in dialogue with Doyle’s conception of inter-imperiality to listen to listening in twentieth-century, inter-imperial Istanbul.

To do so, I take up modernist writer Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar’s mid-century psychological novel A Mind at Peace [Huzur]—a monumental account of Istanbul intellectuals navigating relationships and identities in a fractured present, (Tanpınar 2008 [1948]). Huzur is permeated by sound and listening: the city of Istanbul, post-imperial memory, and Ottoman-Turkish art music metaphorically represent each other throughout; through extended, multi-perspectival accounts of listening to both Ottoman-Turkish and Western art music, the novel narrates a chronotopic tour through Istanbul. I explore how listening in Huzur inscribes the city of Istanbul and the bodies and subjectivities of twentieth-century Turkish intellectual elites within an inter-imperial chronotope, Freudian psychoanalytic framework, and a discourse of Occidentalism (Ahıska 2010). I argue that Huzur inscribes a dialectical listening relationship between distance and immersive proximity, and that in this way the novel narrates a modern inter-imperial Istanbul built upon the negotiation of distance and proximity from/to the Ottoman past, a hyperreal Europe, and the psychological drives of Eros and Thanatos for which these are metonyms. In this way, I argue that listening itself becomes a key infrastructure of modern Istanbul that binds and separates imperial histories, urban spaces, and subjectivities at the interstices of Asia and Europe. More broadly, I suggest that listening to listening might help to re-imagine present urban contexts contoured by inter-imperial dynamics and inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a generative dialectic of inter-imperiality in the framing of Bengali music history in relation to globally circulating networks of musical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the British colony, Calcutta was a major economic and cultural centre where print media paved the way for the production and dissemination of a large number of songbooks, pamphlets, and manuals on music and the performing arts (Williams 2016; Schofield 2018). In many such works, multiple narrative frameworks of history are employed, ranging from regional chronicle narratives to internationally circulating models of political, linguistic, and social theory curated by the forces of colonialism and modernity. Using Laura Doyle's inter-imperiality framework (Doyle 2020), I investigate the relationship between music and history in the field of Bengali music writing, where orientalist scholarship and evolutionary biology are synchronically intertwined to frame music as a product shaping and shaped through a dialectical relationship with global history. To achieve this, I examine English-language and Bengali texts from the period including the works of pioneering musicologists such as Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840-1914) and Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay (1846-1904). As well I argue how the diachronic and relational transition of music writing from the Mughal period to British imperialism led to the formation of what Partha Chatterjee called “a shared discursive formation” (Chatterjee 1993). I conclude with a reflection of these matters and their relational link to Western Art Music, particularly the ways by which representational strategies such as music notation (Capwell 1986; Farrell 1997) were deployed to frame an inter-imperial dialectic in the shaping of Bengali music history in the long nineteenth century.

This paper examines the role of colonial music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage in the wake of the economic and ideological crisis known as the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using Laura Doyle's framework of inter-imperiality, I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of colonial Catholic sacred music that emerged in the 1990s sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto the restored colonial spaces of Havana. As such, my paper demonstrates how this musical revival is intrinsically tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities since the 1990s carried out by the institution of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. Focusing on the historiography of Cuban chapel master Esteban Salas (1725–1803) and the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s contemporary revival of colonial music, I demonstrate how writings about—and performances of—colonial music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the postcolonial present. This imaginative, presentist perspective conveys two ideas: cultural and racial mixing as inherent in Cuban identity, and a sense of agency for contemporary Cuba in infusing hegemonic Spanish and European culture with subaltern cultural practices. Building on work by music scholars such as Marysol Quevedo and Susan Thomas who illuminate the richly textured relationships among art music, cultural institutions, race, and class in twentieth-century Cuba, I argue that the revival of colonial music is a means through which the fraught colonial past is enrolled in the needs of the post-colonial, post-Revolutionary, post-Soviet present to foster local identity in place and project a sense of belonging at a time of profound change and uncertainty. More broadly, I suggest how an inter-imperial analysis can help unpack the complexities of the borders between the past and the present to understand how empires and post-empires co-form musical economies and cultural institutions in contemporary Cuba.