Transpacific East Asia
Transformations and Trajectories in Music and Sound
The deadline to apply for this conference has passed.
CFP:
Music studies has seen the emergence of oceanic approaches that de-center nationalist frameworks in music historiography. In recent decades, for example, Atlantic and Indian oceanic historiographies have re-shaped our understandings and conceptualizations of music and sonic formations by paying more attention to colonial encounters and contacts, as well as emancipatory and everyday practices resulting from these relations. Research on Pacific or transpacific trajectories in music have also been gaining traction in recent years (see, for example, Irving 2010, Solis 2015, Rao 2017). This conference aims to amplify and widen conversations on transpacific formations in music across genres and, more broadly, sound, by inviting papers that explore music and sound that circulated across or around the Pacific Ocean. While the Pacific Ocean’s myriad intersections with disparate world areas is acknowledged – the Pacific Ocean is the world’s largest ocean – this conference focuses on East Asia. Papers that illuminate on or reconceive inter-Asian, East Asian diasporic, Asian American, or East Asian-Latin American trajectories are welcome. Ultimately, this exploratory conference as a whole seeks to ask: how does moving from a landed perspective to an oceanic one help us reconceptualize scale, identity, agency, methodology, and interdisciplinarity within research on music and sound?
Papers may explore the intersection of music / sound in transpacific contexts with any of the following:
Translation, language & music
Technology, economy
Vocalization, aurality, and/or inscriptional practice
Historical or contemporary Pacific empires
Christian missionization; militarization across the Pacific
Movement, marginality, insubordination
Cosmopolitanism, hybridity, pleasure
Ethics of encounter, decoloniality, indigeneity
Maritime histories
We also welcome:
Presentations on underexamined historical archives or sources
Experimental pieces; disciplinary critiques
Theoretical papers; papers on new methods
Program Commitee
Jen-yen Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Bo kyung Blenda Im (Harvard University, USA)
Hee-sun Kim (Kookmin University, South Korea)
Martyn Smith (University of Sheffield, UK)