Conference Agenda

Created in 1970 by Ariano Suassuna (1927–2014) at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the Armorial Movement was an artistic initiative that sought to reimagine national cultural identity by cultivating an erudite art form rooted in the folk traditions of the Northeast region. As one of Brazil’s most celebrated playwrights, Suassuna was a member of the “Lettered City,” a term coined by cultural theorist Ángel Rama to describe an intellectual elite that used writing to consolidate power and shape the historiographical discourses of the nation (Rama 1984). The Northeast occupies a contested place in the historiographical discourses of Brazil, being described either as a space of drought, poverty, and rebellion, or as the repository of an essentialized national cultural identity and as a locus of resistance to foreign cultural imperialism.

Drawing on histories of sound reproduction and aurality (Sterne 2003; Ochoa Gautier 2006, 2014) and musicological and literary critiques of the Lettered City (Madrid 2016, 2025; McEnaney 2019), I argue that sound functions as an epistemological category that challenges the historiographies promulgated by members of the Lettered City in the South who have cast the Northeast as a culturally and politically regressive region in the context of national modernity.

I apply the notion of ekphrasis, the vivid description of works of art in a literary text, to examine how Suassuna’s writings regarding the specificity of Northeastern culture were transduced into a sound episteme and subsequently inscribed by musicians into aesthetically mediated archives that performatively reproduce the ideologies of the Armorial Movement.

Through a contextualized listening to archives such as the Armorial Quintet’s critically acclaimed LP, Do romance ao galope Nordestino (1974) and the instruments specifically designed for this recording, I seek to denaturalize the “Armorial Sound” epistemology and assess the entanglements of Armorial artists and intellectuals with the military regime’s nationalist agenda. By foregrounding sound as a politically and intellectually significant mode of knowledge production, I show how the Armorial Sound contributed to the production and dissemination of knowledge that elevated folk culture into an epistemology embraced by intellectual elites and integrated into the cultural politics of the authoritarian state.

How can working across disciplinary boundaries increase digital access to, and community engagement with, audiovisual archives? This paper, co-presented by a musicologist and two librarians, describes a collaboration to activate a large audiovisual archive and argues that multifaceted transdisciplinary collaborations can support sustainable research infrastructures that themselves serve multiple purposes. While community-centered archives often foreground unexplored histories (Sheffield 2017; Hall 2001) and interactive electronic archives may serve as a “basis of collective memory” (Appadurai 2003, 18), building the necessary public-facing infrastructures requires material resources and specialized skills. We describe the creation of a bilingual open access online portal and digital archive to provide curated access to the Fonds Jean Trudel collection (150+ hours of audio/video, 2000+ digital objects), which has been certified by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board as of outstanding significance for Canadian history and national life. Following Barwick (2019), who distinguishes between archivists, end users, and “knowledge holders,” where the latter are deeply embedded in the community with which an archive is associated, we demonstrate that, in the case of the Fonds Jean Trudel, a musicology-library partnership has created the necessary infrastructure to allow the musicologist to move beyond preservation, organization, and documentation to community-oriented transmission and dissemination, or what Seeger and Chaudhuri (2015) call the “collaborative archiving of community traditions” (25). Each library is responsible for documenting and sustaining the communities it serves, their material conditions and their histories (Lankes 2011; Kisilowska-Szurmińska et al. 2024) even as digital dissemination may obscure the local contexts of knowledge production. The Fonds Jean Trudel advances this mandate by ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of a faculty member’s research, embedding experiential learning for students in the information professions, expanding multilingual and audiovisual capacity within the library’s shared Islandora-based infrastructure, and strengthening partnerships with allied memory institutions to sustain the circulation of carefully curated, human-produced knowledge (Rothman 2024). We propose faculty-library collaboration as a means of working within university structures to create meaningful and sustained community engagement with archives, reconnecting recordings to the communities where they were made and sharing them with a wider public.

Despite its inherent racism, late-19th century minstrelsy provided artistic and economic opportunities to African-Americans in show business. Especially after the Civil War, black musicians, composers, actors, dancers, acrobats, and other entertainers entered the minstrel business and soon also the Jubilee and Musical Theatre business, creating a broad-based black entertainment industry that influenced developments in entertainment through today. The ‘genuine’ African-American music business in general has yet to see a systematic exploration and analysis. This research is part of an ongoing digital humanities project on black artists of the late-19th century. Wallace King (1845-1903) was praised as “America’s Finest Tenor” in music critiques, who has performed together with famous singer / actor / composer Sam Lucas (1840-1916), for example in the first African-American Musical Theatre show “Out of Bondage” (1876). King had also performed with the Hyers Sisters as well as with the Georgia Minstrels, Callender’s Georgia Minstrels, and Haverly’s Colored Minstrels. After at least two concert tours to England, Wallace King came to Sydney, Australia, in 1893, where he was engaged as tenor at the Opera House, the Lyceum Theatre, at the Royal Standard Theatre, and other venues, and from 1895 through 1900 at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney. In 1901-1902, King was engaged in and around Christ­church, New Zealand. Shortly after his return to the US, King became paralyzed and died on February 20, 1903. Based on extensive newspaper research via digital databases such as www.newspapers.com as well as via genealogy databases such as www.ancestry.com, this paper will present a rediscovery of King’s career. The paper will include a summary of concert tours, membership in music ensembles, musical repertoire performed by King, and a discussion of the reception of his performances.