Modernity's Ear : Listening to Race and Gender in World Music / Roshanak Kheshti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kheshti, Roshanak, Author.

Series:

Postmillennial pop.

Postmillennial Pop ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music and race.

Sound recordings--Social aspects.

Sound recordings.

World music--Social aspects.

World music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (200 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : New York University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Playing by Ear

Introduction

1. The Female Sound Collector and Her Talking Machine

2. Listen, Inc.: Aural Modernity and Incorporation

3. Losing the Listening Self in the Aural Other

4. Racial Noise, Hybridity, and Miscegenation in World Music

5. The World Music Culture of Incorporation

Epilogue: Modernity’s Radical Ear and the Sonic Infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Recordings

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

1-4798-6112-X

OCLC:

929452224