The Online Program of events for the 2023 AMS & SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Rethinking (Im)mobility in Global Music History Studies
Time:
Friday, 10/Nov/2023:
8:00pm - 10:00pm
Location:Windows
Session Topics:
1500–1650, 1900–Present, Global / Transnational Studies, Sound Studies, AMS
Presentations
Rethinking (Im)mobility in Global Music History Studies
Chair(s): Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang (University of Sheffield), Daniel Castro Pantoja (UNC Greensboro)
Discussant(s): Juliana M. Pistorius (University College London)
Presenter(s): Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota), Elisabeth Le Guin (University of California, Los Angeles), Alejandro García Sudo (University of California, Los Angeles)
Organized by the AMS Global Music History Study Group
Scholars interested in developing global approaches to music history have turned to methodologies and key concepts developed in sister disciplines such as global history and cultural geography. In particular, questions about the translocal movement of sounds and musics have become a central concern in global music history research, as demonstrated by recent publications such as Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music on the Move (2020). This panel revisits the subject of (im)mobility, seeking to ask the more fundamental question of how (im)mobility fits within the epistemological and political genealogies that aim to decenter Eurocentric paradigms in music studies. The panel approaches the question of (im)mobility by considering the (perceived) materiality of sound and music, which moves (or is assumed to move) differently from the bodies that produce it. This seemingly disjunctive, asynchronous, and asymmetrical relationship between sound and bodies creates entangled histories of different political ramifications and shared listening practices across large-scale spatial frameworks.
The panelists in this 90-minute roundtable do not assume mobility as a given but rather seek to explain it. Reflecting on The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Sumanth Gopinanth will address the question of mobility's complicated relationship to capitalism. Elizabeth LeGuin and Alejandro García Sudo will interrogate how the bodily mobilities of performance (most obviously, dance, but also rhetorical gesture and corporeal habitus) interfaced with early modern migratory mobilities across the Middle Passage of the Atlantic. Finally, Juliana M. Pistorius will serve as a discussant, responding to the papers by drawing on her experience researching opera, migration, and the politics of coloniality and decoloniality in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Featuring panelists who have explored this subject through different research areas and experiences, this roundtable invites the audience to think through (im)mobility from and across different vantage points.
