Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:05am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Black Atlantic Histories Session Chair: Michael Heller | |
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Sounding Catastrophe: Music, Race, and Trauma across Katrina’s Audiovisual Afterlives Carleton University Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was described as a “disabled city” (Sielman, 2007; Rivin 2015). What does such a designation mean for the soundscape of a city whose identity and economy are so closely tied to music? This has been the challenge of representation confronting filmmakers who have taken up the catastrophe: should they invoke the city’s rich musical heritage or allow the devastation to determine the soundtrack? The 2025 release of Ryan Coogler’s realist historical documentary Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time invites a reassessment of how serialized audiovisual accounts of Katrina and its aftermath frame the relationship between music, disaster, trauma, and the city’s racialized communities (Sonnenberg 2025), with particular attention to HBO’s fictional Treme (2010–2013) by David Simon and Eric Overmyer. Drawing upon the literature of racialized “dark” tourism (Smalley 2022), disaster-based trauma theory (Herman 1982; Keim 2020), and Marek Susdorf’s concept of “music-washing” (2025), this paper explores musical mediation through two audiovisual recountings of Katrina. The five episodes of Race Against Time present the disabled city through a stark observational narrative of personal loss and systemic failure (Harrison 2025), stressing the devastation of the Crescent City’s Black communities (Sonnenberg 2025) and accompanied by unobstrusive atmospheric scoring (Amanda Jones). In contrast, the three seasons of Treme stage New Orleans as a city rebuilding and overcoming trauma through culture, musical heritage, and performance which are centrally positioned as agents of rebirth (Hudelet 2017; Morris and Kadetz 2018) in a tourist-friendly accounting (Thomas 2012). However, taped oral histories of Katrina survivors (from the University of New Orleans Katrina Response Archive, Tulane’s Amistad Research Center, and LSU Libraries Special Collections) provide no real evidence for how music assisted survivors’ documented PTSD recovery (DeSalvo et al. 2007; McLaughlin et al. 2011). Instead, one could read Treme as engaging in what Susdorf terms “sonic overrepresentation” or “music-washing” (2025, 241), by which the grim realities of racialized trauma and structural abandonment are softened through an acoustically saturated representation of the city (Letort 2013; Pattison 2013). Thus political and social inequities are made to yield to the aural exigencies of neoliberal commercial media. | |