Conference Agenda

As South Korean youth confront new formations of musical pasts through the ongoing newtro (new retro) trend, the popular emergence of City Pop destabilizes genre boundaries (Bauman & Briggs 1990), not merely reviving but actively reconfiguring musical categories through listening, (re)historicization, and material circulation (Bitter 2023, Feld 2012, Ochoa Gautier 2014). Initially associated with 1980s Japanese pop music and retroactively codified online (Sommet 2020, Wajima 2022), City Pop gained popularity among Koreans in the late 2010s. This revival became politically charged during Seoul’s 2019 Japanese Product Boycott demonstrations, where anti-Japanese sentiment (Ching 2019) spurred a reimagined “Korean City Pop,” crafting a post-authoritarian music history independent from Japanese influence. Yet, the continued appeal of intersecting “City Pop” variants amid this politicized sentiment unsettles nationalist listening frameworks.

Drawing from fieldwork across Seoul’s LP bars, I foreground how aural relations between vinyl DJs and precariously employed Koreans foster the generative formation of personal playlists, which become an aural practice to navigate (un)belonging amid their broader social alienation from the politics of everyday life in Seoul (Berardi 2015, Lefebvre 1991). Eschewing organizational—and national—constraints of City Pop-as-genre, I examine how everyday listening-centric acts of playlisting, as both an analog archival practice and smartphone-based digital extraction, underscore relational intimacies that challenge reductive political narratives of contemporary Korean listening cultures—whether as national (anti)consumption (Kendall 2001) or an aural fetishization of the colonial/ized Other (Atkins 2007, Robinson 2021). Writing through the (dis)organizational and (non)relational form of the playlist, I trace throughlines illustrating how these listening practices rework frameworks of urban belonging in Korea.

In his book, Ancestral Future (2022), Indigenous writer, philosopher, and activist, Aílton Krenak defends the search for a reconnection with nature and simple forms of inhabiting Earth. His attempt to solve the “many planetary crisis” addresses not only a material reframing, but transformations to symbolic and imaginary worldviews. One applied example of this shift in perspective is Krenak’s adaptation to Carlos Gomes’s Il Guarany (1870) for São Paulo’s Municipal Theater in 2023. This opera has an ambiguous legacy in Brazilian culture regarding its pasts and historicity (Rodrigues 2011, Batterman Cháirez 2023). On the one hand, it is the most prominent Brazilian opera that reflects much of the aspiration of national elites—past and present—in fashioning a cosmopolitan modernity, both in the text and in the music. On the other hand, the plot and music efface the indigenous voices that sets the opera within a national context.

In this paper, I investigate Krenak’s strategies to subvert the colonial narrative of the opera, adding multiple layers to what he calls the “surroundings of the opera.” These strategies include adding indigenous doubles to represent a perspectivist ontology (Viveiros de Castro 2009), using projections and set designs that reconfigure the space of the opera house, and bringing Guarani’s performers to the stage. Krenak’s “surrounding of the opera” echoes Dylan Robinson’s proposed strategy to use “material and spatial forms of writing” in creating cojoined spaces for Indigenous and non-indigenous forms and audiences (Robinson 2020). In this sense, Krenak brings Il Guarany and its historical readings to the present, complexifying the meanings for indigenous identities as represented in the mythical narrative from the opera. In his first foray into operatic stages, I argue that Krenak applies a vernacular performance theory that he has been developing over the years in different spaces: from speaking podium in the 1988 Constituent Assembly to recent media interviews and books. In shifting the ways that colonial narrative is portrayed, Krenak not only updates Il Guarany and its national meanings, but also suggest paths for opera’s futures.

When late-19th century industrialism prompted a worldwide surge in demand for rubber, it transformed Manaus—a small city in the heart of the Amazon—into one of the most prosperous places in the world. Manaus’s wealth was built in the context of ruthless extraction from the environment and of indigenous labor. The rubber elite sought to immortalize their triumph over what they deemed untamed nature in an opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, inaugurated in 1896. In the recently proclaimed Brazilian Republic, the theater crystallized the semiotics of institutional power and an emerging postcolonial identity, negotiated in relation to the environment—on the level of representation and physical reality.
In this paper, I argue that the opera house in Manaus served to dichotomize nature and civilization. Building on James Q. Davies (2023), whose work shows how musical Romanticism’s “discovery of the environment” is embroiled in colonialism and medical history, this paper demonstrates how a postcolonial music institution constructed “nature” through this demarcation. Drawing on thinkers such as Mircea Eliade (1959), I analyze the opera house’s architecture as analogous to sacred places, establishing a separation between chaos and order via the façade’s emphasis on the threshold. In this way, the opera house played a crucial role in the movement towards “civilization,” the Brazilian elite’s project of westernization but also of governmentality and racial whitening. This process was dialectical: The theater itself with its luxurious building materials imported from Europe became a stage for displaying European cosmopolitanism and urbanity. Opera and metaphysically separated romantic music functioned as an ordered counter-space to rural life and the “hostile” environment. Concomitantly, large-scale landscape paintings of the Amazon pointed to the outside, mystifying the environment and signaling the domination over it (Benjamin 1986), thereby partaking in an identy-building process. However, the Amazon’s hot climate and misconceptions about tropic air undermined the European “utopia,” causing its conceived space to contradict the perceived space (Henri Lefebvre 1997) of Manaus’s population. This study expands our understanding of how music institutions stabilized postcolonial power over people and the environment through architecture on the surface and music aesthetics in the background.