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, 02:57:53am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Time and History in Black Musical Thought Session Chair: Pheaross Graham Discussant: Guilherme Feitosa de Almeida | |
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Cultural Vampirism and Musical Resistance in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners University of Washington, Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025) offers a significant intervention in contemporary Black horror cinema through its deployment of blues music as both narrative device and epistemological framework. I argue that the film positions Delta blues not as historical artifact but as what Clyde Woods terms "blues epistemology," a living system of knowledge production that preserves African-American cultural memory while resisting extractive appropriation. Drawing on Woods's theorization of blues as explanatory tradition emerging from plantation capitalism, A.J. Dalton's concept of geopolitical vampirism, and Kristin Burnett and Judith Leggatt's analysis of cultures rendered "undead" through colonial preservation, I examine how Sinners inverts traditional vampire narratives by positioning cultural appropriators, rather than racialized Others, as parasitic monsters. The film's pivotal "I Lied to You" juke joint sequence demonstrates this inversion through its radical collapsing of temporal and stylistic boundaries, layering traditional Delta blues with African rhythms and hip-hop production to refuse the ossification of Black musical traditions. I analyze the film’s sonic architecture, examining how Göransson's scoring choices and the strategic blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic boundaries construct Black identity and resist cultural extraction. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how Sinners positions the struggle over cultural ownership as a struggle over epistemological authority. The film suggests that effective resistance to cultural vampirism lies not in defensive preservation but in ongoing creative transformation that insists on the vitality and continued relevance of Black cultural production. | |