SHUM 6667 - Sonic Remains: Media, Performance, and Material Culture

(crosslisted) MUSIC 6667, STS 6667

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: graduate students. Co-meets with MUSIC 4667/SHUM 4667/STS 4667.

M. Zuazu.

Sonic Remains investigates how music/sound are mobilized to negotiate the passage of time, as well as how, by enduring and being retrieved through bodies, objects, and media formats, they challenge the pastness of the past. The course familiarizes students with key approaches to the material culture of music and sonic media, as well as with questions that animate critical thinking about the presence of the past across the disciplines. In addition to scholarship, we will consider how work by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Allora & Calzadilla, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Susan Schuppli, Lourdes Portillo, or Nadine Robinson, among other artists, intervenes in these questions (and remains). Topics include the sonic afterlives of imperial projects, sonic memorials, electronic waste, audio reenactments and revivals in living history, knowledge-production, and performance practices. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.