Conference Agenda

This roundtable gathers around historical materialism and socialist modes of analysis and political practice for music, sound and movement. We seek to envision anti-capitalist theorization and praxis that challenge the liberal paradigm as the universal ground for sociopolitical and ethnomusicological inquiry. Panelists examine the ways in which socialist and anti-capitalist projects have structured auralities and corporalities around the globe and offer them as models to confront the current impasses colluding against imagining anti-capitalist futures; both ethnomusicology’s internal ideologies and brushes with socialism; historical and contemporary employment of historical materialist analysis; and past and present socialist responses to the crises of capitalism. Panelist 1 explores the anti-caste musical landscape of modern western India to trace the tensions between caste and class over the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Panelist 2 focuses on the legacies of Yugoslav workers’ self-management in exploring the potentials and limits of music and sound in building productive relations based on social ownership. Panelist 3 discusses the pertinence of two concepts stemming from historical materialism - acoustic labor and sound praxis - to ethnographic research on music and sound in working-classRio de Janeiro. Panelist 4 works on the legacies of commoning and cooperative movements in Reconstruction-era Louisiana to foreground the counter-plantation politics of Black brass bands. Panelist 5 examines how socialist artists in the 1970s drew on labor union folk dances from the 1960s to mobilize public space and create solidarity among workers in Turkey. Panelist 6 examines ethnomusicology’s ideological commitments to liberalism in the 1990s globalization debates.