‘Attending to the Moment: Aesthetics, Politics, Sound’ with Louise Meintjes

After a COVID-induced break, we are now pleased to welcome Louise Meintjes as speaker and key discussant for our 3rd Anthropology of Music Lecture Series and Master Class, 13-16 July, 2022, at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (Germany). This year’s event is entitled ‘Attending to the Moment: Aesthetics, Politics, Sound‘. In a series of three lectures and in conversation with master class participants and their research projects, Louise Meintjes will discuss the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the framework of what she calls an ethical analysis of sound:

Ethnomusicology, and Anthropology of the Arts, have long wrestled over how to depict the relationships among aesthetics and politics, among art, pleasure and activism, among performance, oppression and violence. With an ear toward the present in which we find ourselves (in the world, in the academy, in music and sound studies), and an eye on the vitality of bodies and breath, how do we attend to the moment? What kind of research, analysis and writing succeeds in keeping the details of artistry that lend art its persuasive or affective power on the page? What approaches succeed in grasping the specific political efficacy of the arts, without reducing artistic process to a political act? In instances in which the pleasure of participation in the arts is limned by violence, what constitutes political efficacy?

The seminar will emphasize ethnographies of music, performance, and sound and is open to addressing multi-modal ethnographic practices that focus on these particular arts. From working in the context of the legacy of apartheid to Black Lives Matter, from the slow violence of environmental degradation to the drama of climate events and the pandemic, what does an ethical analysis of the sonic arts look and sound like?”

Louise Meintjes is Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University (Durham, USA). A distinguished musicologist and anthropologist, Louise Meintjes’ evocative writing and thinking revolves around the question of how music and the world relate to and act upon each other. For her book Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2017), she co-won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s (SEM) Alan Merriam Prize for the most distinguished English-language monograph published in the field of ethnomusicology in 2018. Further important publications include the book Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, or the articles The Recording Studio as Fetish (in J. Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader) and Soundscapes: Toward a sounded anthropology (Annual Review of Anthropology, with D. W. Samuels, A. M. Ochoa, and T. Porcello).

For more information, please check out Louise Meintjes’ Website.

Please find our call for applications with details on how to apply here.

Timeline:

The call for applications will be sent out in early January 2022, with a deadline on March 31, 2022. We’ll return to you within two weeks and ask all invited participants to confirm their participation by April 30, 2022. Around May, 2022 we’ll send out some recommended reading material and the accepted absracts as preparation for the event, which will take place July 13-16, 2022 at JGU Mainz.

Dates in short:

January 2022       call for applications

March 31, 2022     application deadline

April 15, 2022     our return and invitation

April 30, 2022     binding confirmation by the participants

May 2022           distribution of reading material and abstracts

July, 13-16 2022   AoM-LS/MC ‘Attending to the Moment: Aesthetics, Politics, Sound’                    with Louise Meintjes