Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1856699
Shannon Garland
ABSTRACT This article discusses how love arose as a political ethos in São Paulo, Brazil. The meaning and feeling of love emerged as middle-class artists sought to do what they love as work; activists demanded rights to the city through cultural intervention; and a hit song by an obscure rapper lamented that ‘love doesn’t exist in São Paulo’. Cultural activists tied love’s affective resonance to the mayoral campaign of politician Fernando Haddad, who likewise framed his transit policy in loving terms. The article describes how middle-class musical aesthetics stemming from the idea of ‘racial democracy’, as well as artists’ and activists’ desire to ‘do what you love’ as work, eschewed the racialised class conflict that produced an unloving city, leading to a politically impotent articulation of love. The article advances a materialist approach to affect through social reproduction theory, suggesting that the concept of affect is useful only if it takes account of the social politics that shape affective resonance, particularly the central conflict between human life and the generation of capital. It argues that affects brought forth through cultural products like music only serve political change if overtly connected to a larger programme of structural transformation which incorporates class conflict.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1848603
A. Hofman
ABSTRACT This essay offers a close reading of the promises ingrained in the political potential of aural experience in the recent literature addressing affect. It focuses on why, how and when scholars privilege affect when thinking about the political capacities of music and sound in the current moment of global neoliberalism. The essay reflects on scholarly works that theorise political agency after 2008 and concentrates on affect as a need or a quest for a theoretical framework that proposes new avenues to act politically. It starts from the assumption that scholarly production that employs affect tells us much less about the very political potential of affect, and much more about a desire for a radical reshaping of our understanding of where and how we search for political potentialities. The second part of the essay presents a critical perspective on this desire and the relationship between affective and ideological politics. Using my ethnographic work on activist singing in the area of former Yugoslavia as an example that offers a perspective from the former state-socialist world, I take a critical look at the potential inscribed in affective politics beyond liberal political thought.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1878468
Anaar DESAI-STEPHENS, Nicole Reisnour
Over the past two decades, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have homed in on affect as a crucial dimension of political life. This special issue argues that music – as sound and as practice – has an important role to play in this evolving academic conversation. While music can and does carry symbolic meanings, people are commonly drawn to music because of how it makes them feel. Moreover, these feelings have exceptional potency, enabling the emergence of new subjectivities, social collectives and political imaginaries. Building on recent developments and critiques of affect theory from within the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies and ethnomusicology, this special issue seeks to push the conversation forward by better accounting for the musical life of affect. We begin this introduction with a brief overview of the relevant literature on affect in order to situate our own interventions, both conceptually and disciplinarily. We then explore the work that music does in responding to critiques of affect theory. Here, we propose the idea of ‘musical feelings’ as an inclusive conceptual framework for discussing the sensations and stories that endow music with social efficacy, thereby overcoming some of the theoretical impasses which, we suggest, may be discouraging broader engagement with affect among music scholars. Following this, we draw attention to the varied political projects that musically-mediated affects both augur and facilitate. In the final section, we examine the methodological challenges posed by the study of musical feelings, highlighting the affordances of ethnography and the necessity of multi-sited, multi-scalar dynamic research in accounting for musical feelings’ social efficacy.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1848602
B. Bond
ABSTRACT This article examines the affective enactment of the Sufi emotional concept of the pain of separation by Muslim singers in Kachchh, Gujarat, a border region in western India adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. In a discussion of two musical genres that feature the Sufi poetry of Shāh ‘Abdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689–1752 CE) – kāfī and shāh jo rāg̈ – I argue that the musical performance of pain is ethically efficacious as well as politically salient. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Kachchh in 2014–2018, the article traces the ways in which poetry performers and enthusiasts conceive of musico-poetic pain as a form of Islamic worship that has ethical benefits for performers and listeners, such as tranquility and the purification of one’s heart. It thus demonstrates how Sindhi Sufi music functions as an affective, embodied, gendered and vernacular means of engagement with the Islamic discursive tradition. The latter portion of the article widens the focus, taking the pain of separation as a lens through which to examine Hindu-Muslim relations in Kachchh, where Hindu nationalism and Islamic reform have contributed to socio-religious polarisation since the 1980s. Drawing on examples from local musical history, I explore the political salience of the pain of separation by showing how the musical performance of Shāh Bhiṭā’ī’s female-voice poetry historically facilitated interreligious forms of male sociality in Kachchh.
本文考察了古吉拉特邦卡奇赫的穆斯林歌手对分离之痛的苏菲情感概念的情感制定，卡奇赫是印度西部与巴基斯坦信德省相邻的边境地区。在讨论苏菲派诗歌Shāh ' Abdul Lat Bhiṭā '(公元1689-1752年)的两种音乐流派(kāfī和shāh jo rāg)时，我认为痛苦的音乐表现在伦理上是有效的，在政治上也是显著的。根据2014-2018年在Kachchh为期18个月的田野调查，本文追溯了诗歌表演者和爱好者如何将音乐-诗意的痛苦视为伊斯兰崇拜的一种形式，这种形式对表演者和听众都有道德上的好处，比如宁静和心灵的净化。因此，它展示了信德苏菲音乐是如何作为一种情感的、具体化的、性别化的和白话文的方式与伊斯兰话语传统接触的。文章的后半部分扩大了焦点，以分离的痛苦为视角，审视克奇的印度教徒与穆斯林的关系。自20世纪80年代以来，克奇的印度教民族主义和伊斯兰教改革导致了社会宗教两极分化。从当地音乐史的例子中，我通过展示Shāh Bhiṭā ' ' '的女声诗歌的音乐表演如何在历史上促进了Kachchh男性社会的宗教间形式，来探索分离之痛的政治突出性。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1886137
Peter McMurray
ABSTRACT Semah is an Alevi ritual practice performed throughout Anatolia (Turkey) and the Alevi diaspora consisting of collective, dance-like movements that often take on or mimic the movements of animals, especially cranes. In attempting to elucidate that interplay between human performer and sacred animal, I draw on theoretical writings (especially philosophy and affect theory) about how people might – or might not – be able to become – or become like – other animals or forms of life, and what kind of affective processes that becoming might entail. I focus here especially on the role of semah in Sivas, Turkey, during the 1993 Pir Sultan Cultural Festival, during which Alevi participants, including many semah performers and musicians, were killed in an arson attack. Histories of that event highlight how prior to the attack, semah performers at the festival exemplified the possibility of becoming (like) cranes. Furthermore, many Alevis have placed semah at the centre of subsequent memorial events, suggesting new forms of affect and becoming as a political (and often public) response to the trauma of the Sivas massacre.
{"title":"What is it like to be a crane? Notes on Alevi semah and the Sivas massacre","authors":"Peter McMurray","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1886137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1886137","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Semah is an Alevi ritual practice performed throughout Anatolia (Turkey) and the Alevi diaspora consisting of collective, dance-like movements that often take on or mimic the movements of animals, especially cranes. In attempting to elucidate that interplay between human performer and sacred animal, I draw on theoretical writings (especially philosophy and affect theory) about how people might – or might not – be able to become – or become like – other animals or forms of life, and what kind of affective processes that becoming might entail. I focus here especially on the role of semah in Sivas, Turkey, during the 1993 Pir Sultan Cultural Festival, during which Alevi participants, including many semah performers and musicians, were killed in an arson attack. Histories of that event highlight how prior to the attack, semah performers at the festival exemplified the possibility of becoming (like) cranes. Furthermore, many Alevis have placed semah at the centre of subsequent memorial events, suggesting new forms of affect and becoming as a political (and often public) response to the trauma of the Sivas massacre.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"89 1","pages":"151 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84237844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1884987
Nicole Reisnour
ABSTRACT This essay examines the social efficacy of musically mediated religious feeling, drawing on fieldwork conducted with a community of Balinese Hindus who have become devotees of ISKCON, the international devotional movement popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Through analysis of my conversations and musical interactions with members of this community, I argue that ISKCON’s narratives and practices of feeling render the affective stirrings that people experience while singing into knowable signs of spiritual progress while at the same time generating the bodily sensibilities that enable participants to experience those affects with greater levels of intensity. Bringing these ethnographic insights into conversation with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that theorizes a productive ‘gap’ between affective intensity and discursive qualification, this essay proposes that, rather than affect giving way to emotion through a linear process of discursive capture, the two remain in a continual, mutually sustaining interplay. Extending the concept of the affect-emotion gap to the domain of music, the essay offers ethnographic and theoretical insight into the processes by which music’s affective affordances become efficacious in social life.
{"title":"If you sing, you will surely feel happy: the affect-emotion gap and the efficacy of devotional song in Bali","authors":"Nicole Reisnour","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1884987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1884987","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines the social efficacy of musically mediated religious feeling, drawing on fieldwork conducted with a community of Balinese Hindus who have become devotees of ISKCON, the international devotional movement popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Through analysis of my conversations and musical interactions with members of this community, I argue that ISKCON’s narratives and practices of feeling render the affective stirrings that people experience while singing into knowable signs of spiritual progress while at the same time generating the bodily sensibilities that enable participants to experience those affects with greater levels of intensity. Bringing these ethnographic insights into conversation with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that theorizes a productive ‘gap’ between affective intensity and discursive qualification, this essay proposes that, rather than affect giving way to emotion through a linear process of discursive capture, the two remain in a continual, mutually sustaining interplay. Extending the concept of the affect-emotion gap to the domain of music, the essay offers ethnographic and theoretical insight into the processes by which music’s affective affordances become efficacious in social life.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"9 1","pages":"133 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80047007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1856700
T. Turner
ABSTRACT What does it mean to be musically haunted? In the Algerian popular Islamic ritual called dīwān, one can be haunted by the deep, bass-register melodies of spirits, saints and historical figures of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Musical haunting is affective haunting. Melodies are not only felt emotionally as recurrent fear, dread and ambiguous loss (Boss 1999. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.) but they are also simultaneously physically arresting for the body and senses, erupting into uncomfortable sensations like prickling skin and knots in the stomach, eventually precipitating into registers of trance. Here, musical affects manifest spectrally – both directly as non-human entities or spirits and indirectly through strong emotions that tend to ‘take over’. The haunted are never eventually ‘healed’ in ritual, in the sense of completion; suffering always comes back in some form. Rather, dīwān is a modality of continually inhabiting and embodying various tumultuous, political histories perpetually resounding through the daily lives and physical bodies of the dīwān community. By way of non-Western understandings of affect, music, and ritualised temporality, this essay illustrates an intertwined, spectral interdependency of music, affect and politics.
{"title":"Affective temporalities of presence and absence: musical haunting and embodied political histories in an Algerian religious community","authors":"T. Turner","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1856700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1856700","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What does it mean to be musically haunted? In the Algerian popular Islamic ritual called dīwān, one can be haunted by the deep, bass-register melodies of spirits, saints and historical figures of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Musical haunting is affective haunting. Melodies are not only felt emotionally as recurrent fear, dread and ambiguous loss (Boss 1999. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.) but they are also simultaneously physically arresting for the body and senses, erupting into uncomfortable sensations like prickling skin and knots in the stomach, eventually precipitating into registers of trance. Here, musical affects manifest spectrally – both directly as non-human entities or spirits and indirectly through strong emotions that tend to ‘take over’. The haunted are never eventually ‘healed’ in ritual, in the sense of completion; suffering always comes back in some form. Rather, dīwān is a modality of continually inhabiting and embodying various tumultuous, political histories perpetually resounding through the daily lives and physical bodies of the dīwān community. By way of non-Western understandings of affect, music, and ritualised temporality, this essay illustrates an intertwined, spectral interdependency of music, affect and politics.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"441 1","pages":"169 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86854978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1858126
A. Mcgraw
ABSTRACT In this essay, I employ a Spinozist concept of affect to explain accounts of musical feeling in a jail music programme. Residents of the jail regularly described two affectively opposed ‘atmospheres’ in the institution, which I term carceral and liberatory atmospheres. I argue that atmospheres emerge from affective fields, conditioned by the probability space of a situation. The capacity (or incapacity) to act, affect and be affected (Spinoza’s affectus) is dependent upon what is probable for people, as members of particular social groups, in a situation. I describe how carceral and liberatory atmospheres emerge from the interaction of sonic and affective fields in the jail. Following Spinoza’s Ethics, I argue that these atmospheres are ethically opposed, implying alternate ontologies of the human. In carceral atmospheres prisoners are objectified as static things whose behaviour jail administrators seek to control and determine; in liberatory atmospheres prisoners imagine themselves as open-ended processes infused with potential. Liberatory atmospheres were marked by a comparatively open probability space in which the unexpected might happen and new possibilities might emerge. For many of the jail’s residents, it was in music that choice could be exercised and the new could emerge.
{"title":"Feeling the feels: Spinozist ethics and musical feeling in an American jail","authors":"A. Mcgraw","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1858126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1858126","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this essay, I employ a Spinozist concept of affect to explain accounts of musical feeling in a jail music programme. Residents of the jail regularly described two affectively opposed ‘atmospheres’ in the institution, which I term carceral and liberatory atmospheres. I argue that atmospheres emerge from affective fields, conditioned by the probability space of a situation. The capacity (or incapacity) to act, affect and be affected (Spinoza’s affectus) is dependent upon what is probable for people, as members of particular social groups, in a situation. I describe how carceral and liberatory atmospheres emerge from the interaction of sonic and affective fields in the jail. Following Spinoza’s Ethics, I argue that these atmospheres are ethically opposed, implying alternate ontologies of the human. In carceral atmospheres prisoners are objectified as static things whose behaviour jail administrators seek to control and determine; in liberatory atmospheres prisoners imagine themselves as open-ended processes infused with potential. Liberatory atmospheres were marked by a comparatively open probability space in which the unexpected might happen and new possibilities might emerge. For many of the jail’s residents, it was in music that choice could be exercised and the new could emerge.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"267 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90641132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1828119
Andrés García Molina
ABSTRACT When evaluating contemporary pregones, or street-vendor songs, most Cubans tend to resort to comparisons between the sounds of the present and sonic imaginaries of bygone times, often describing the sound of current vendors as an impoverished version of what were once beautiful, unique songs. At face value, these assessments point to the formal features of street-vendor songs, crystallizing around what appear to be direct descriptions of sounds heard on a daily basis. After enough probing, however, an analysis of these judgments reveals how such aesthetic descriptions are layered with multiple meanings, pointing to questions which are not contained in their literal signification nor sufficiently interrogated through formal analysis alone. My research suggests that when Cubans say something like ‘present-day vendors have forgotten how to sing’, they are also tacitly enunciating, through musical discourse, opinions on adjacent, specific issues. In this article, I focus on a cluster of questions around the musicality of street vendors that is directly related to issues of gender, race, and internal migration from the Cuban Eastern provinces to the capital. My analysis includes literary and ethnographic sources, the latter derived from extended interactions with consumers and listeners of pregones as well as vendors themselves.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1857287
Lila Ellen Gray
ABSTRACT Listening to music might make one tremble, cry or get up and dance in response. Musical feelings might spread from listener to listener in a hard to pin down but nevertheless palpable ‘emotional contagion’. While theorising emotion, feeling or sentiment in relation to the social life of music and sound is not new, for the most part, scholars in music and sound studies have been relative late comers to the contemporary conversation on affect theory. In this essay, I place two academic turns in productive alignment, an ‘affective turn’ and a turn in ethnomusicology, the anthropology of music and sound and the interdisciplinary field of critical sound studies to the study of listening and aurality. What might methodological approaches gleaned from the anthropology of music and sound lend to theorizations of method for the anthropology of emotion and affect? In what ways is affect rendered audible as an object of analysis in the process of doing ethnography? Focusing on analyses of select audio-visual field recordings, I ask, how can we listen for affect? And what theoretical and methodological considerations might emerge when we do?
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