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Modernity's ear : listening to race and gender in world music / Roshanak Kheshti.

By: Kheshti, Roshanak.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookSeries: Postmillennial pop: Publisher: USA : New York University Press , 2015Description: 179 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.ISBN: 9781479867011 (cl : alk. paper); 9781479817863 (pb : alk. paper).Subject(s): World music -- Social aspects | Sound recordings -- Social aspects | Music and raceDDC classification: 780.9
Contents:
The female sound collector and her talking machine -- Listen, Inc. : aural modernity and incorporation -- Losing the listening self in the aural other -- Racial noise, hybridity, and miscegenation in world music -- The world music culture of incorporation -- Epilogue : modernity's radical ear and the sonic infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston's recordings.
Summary: "Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early "songcatchers" were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the 'other' that made them. In Modernity's Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity's Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self." -- Publisher's description
List(s) this item appears in: Fall 2020
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Item type Current location Call number Status Date due
Non Fiction Non Fiction BardBerlinLibrary
2nd floor
780.9 KHE 2015 (Browse shelf) Available

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-170) and index.

The female sound collector and her talking machine -- Listen, Inc. : aural modernity and incorporation -- Losing the listening self in the aural other -- Racial noise, hybridity, and miscegenation in world music -- The world music culture of incorporation -- Epilogue : modernity's radical ear and the sonic infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston's recordings.

"Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early "songcatchers" were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the 'other' that made them. In Modernity's Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity's Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self." -- Publisher's description

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