Conference Agenda

Borders comprise multiple dimensions. A border creates a binary, of what is on one side or on the other. But there is also the edge itself, the boundary that may be conceptual but is very often material —drawn, fenced, armoured (Popescu 2012). The border’s other dimensions, potentially manifold, are both spatial and temporal: they manifest when and where the border is crossed. Historically and today, border crossings frequently constitute points of friction, dissonance, violence and instability, often with fearful consequences. They may also function as fluid sites of cultural exchange, self-reflection, and transformation, simultaneous states of being and non-being. Occasioning celebration, domination, remembrance or elimination, borders and their crossings are arguably definitive of our modern condition.

This roundtable meets around instances of border crossing during and since the Cold War, to acknowledge that despite/because of incessant reconceptualizing, redrawing, and re-crossing, bordering becomes no less fraught and contested (Vila 2000); rather, new stakes appear today as rapidly as other lines are effaced. Informed by Susan Stanford Friedman’s notion of planetary modernisms (2018) and drawing on the recent global turn in modernist music studies, we ponder border crossings as pivotal modernist moments of encounter across varied geotemporal localities. Our conversation understands the border as a charged marker of territorial domination and political anxiety, but also as a disciplinary and epistemological boundary, and a locus for challenging structures of authority and knowledge creation (Mezzadara and Neilsen 2013). Everywhere borders are marked, delineated, silenced or sounded, their crossings may serve as sites of instantiation—subjective, political, environmental—or of erasure: a dialectical motion underpinning multiple modernisms across diverse geopolitical and temporal contexts.

Ana Alonso-Minutti is concerned with the porousness of borderlands. She discusses the trajectory of composer and visual artist Raven Chacon (b.1977), whose critical engagements with the histories and present of colonialism are rooted in the geographic territories now known as New Mexico and, more broadly, the US-Mexico borderlands. While scholars have addressed Chacon’s work in relation to Indigenous modernity (Levine, Robinson, 2019), less attention is paid to his creative output as reflecting rasquachismo (Frausto 1989): a strategy of resilience and resourcefulness in which elements of “hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration” form both an anticolonialist resistance and a way of being in the world. Alonso-Minutti proposes to understand Chacon’s work as echoing the contradictions, conflicts, and injustices embedded in the borderlands, all within a rasquache sensibility that also manifests the porousness of concepts such as futurism, modernism, and the avant-garde.

Translatory pathways and emerging modernist forms of musical innovation converge in Noriko Manabe’s exploration of the music of Happy End, a pioneering Japanese rock band of the 1970s. She notes that modernism in Japan is often entangled with Westernization—a process of adaptation and localization that did not end with its initial stages during the Meiji Era (1868–1912) but has continued with each newly introduced genre. It is also caught up with both linguistic and cultural modes of translation. Manabe discusses Happy End’s song “Haikara Hakuchi” (“Stylish Idiot”) as a quintessential illustration of Japanese modernism in its adoption of traditional Japanese and contemporary Western musics, its issues of text-setting, and its themes questioning Westernization.

Kevin Karnes looks to the April 1987 visit to Riga by the West German DJ Westbam (Maximilian Lenz) –– the first visit by a Western DJ to the USSR. He considers in particular how that trip sparked a local craze for House music and fueled a union-wide explosion of club culture (Iurchak 2014) in the final years of the Soviet Union. It also inspired a local adaptation of Westbam’s record-based DJ’ing technique using open reels of magnetic tape—the rise of the so-called Tape Jockey—and a vital exchange between DJs in a reunifying Berlin and a fraying USSR. Thus, border-crossings that were geographical, political, artistic, and technological all figure in Karnes’ discussion of the role of DJs in creating an avant-garde musical culture on the transit Riga-West Berlin.

Where borders may be sighted, felt, and also heard, Sherry Lee is interested in technological mediations of listening to and sonifying borderscapes (Biserna 2017). Her discussion approaches select early 21C sound art projects on the Public Records label curated by political-aesthetic collective Ultra-red, which amplify migrant struggles while critiquing techno-bureaucratic control of borders and mobility: Ultra-red’s collaboration with German migrant network Kanak Attak, Elliot Perkins’ Eurodac Express, and WR collective’s field recordings mapping the EU’s eastern border. In particular, Lee asks how Ultra-red’s employment of avant-garde musical techniques (electroacoustic manipulation, glitch) intersect with their distinctive deployment of “protocols for organized listening” on political grounds.

Dan Grimley attends to the idea of border crossing on a seventh continent. Antarctica is a place where the idea of political boundaries seems especially nonsensical, yet following the signing of the Antarctic Treaty on 1 December 1959, the continent’s vast landmass has been divided into territorial zones (still contested) that radiate outwards from the pole. At the same time, Antarctica has served as the ultimate terra nullis—a blank, impassive white sheet that invites narratives of territorial conquest or heroic endeavour, or a sterile field laboratory supporting cutting-edge scientific research and exploration. Yet Grimley calls attention to the way in which sound has been activated as the trace of another kind of border crossing, between human and non-human agencies (Chaput et al, 2018). Amid climate crisis and growing ecological catastrophe, such border crossings in an Antarctic context can figure as a tipping point, one that potentially sounds a place of no-return.

In our investment in border crossings, the participants in this roundtable have not forgotten that—not least owing to the material manifestations of many borders’ politicization—some barriers may not (yet) be crossed. We anticipate this opportunity to converse with AMS colleagues on the possibilities and limits of the border in the schemes of global modernism.