Tuesday, February 25, 2020

1:30 PM at the Pink Parlor

112 East Duke Building – Duke University

Program

1:30 Welcome and presentations

1:45 Romance Studies Dialogue Series Keynote Address: Alejandro L. Madrid (Cornell University)

“The Politics of Distinction and Representation in the Aural Turn: Who Gets to Listen in the ‘Sounded’ City?”

The advent of sound studies as a field of intellectual inquiry as been celebrated as a move away from logocentrism that, with its emphasis on aurality and listening in tandem with current forms of democratization of technology, allows non-specialists an unprecedented access to artistic practices and intellectual cutting-edge transnational intellectual conversations. Knowledge about sound and participation in alternative sound scenes have become markers of cosmopolitan intellectual distinction that allow for the establishment of new symbolic networks of “cultured” belonging beyond national borders. It is precisely this apparent postnational ‘sounded city’ —to paraphrase Angel Rama’s seminal conceptualization about logocentric culture within a rhetoric of sound culture—, its trajectory and consolidation through the surge of institutions developed to host, channel, and nurture it —within the framework of the nation as a unit of identification—, and the contradictions and shortcomings such project entails what this presentation intends to assess critically.

Respondents: David García (UNC-Music), Silvia Serrano (Duke-Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South)

2:55 Silvia Bermúdez (University of California at Santa Barbara)

“Migration and the Politics of Belonging in 21st Century Barcelona: Musical Stories as Counter Memory”

This lecture examines how diverse sonic cultures converging in Barcelona's neighborhood of El Raval at the turn of the 21st Century relied on the social function of music to serve as a counter-memory to the official history of migration narrated by data-driven reports, governmental statistics, and populist and right-wing nationalist narratives. All these sources misrepresented migrant subjects as menacing figures bent on contami-Nation. Particular attention will be paid to songs in which music documents the symbolic and institutional operations that take place to classify and categorize migrant newcomers and subsequent generations as not "belonging" and thus threatening the social fabric of the nation.

Respondents: Anna Tybinko (Duke-Romance Studies), Elia Romera Figueroa (Duke-Romance Studies)

3:50 Coffee Break

4:10 Tom McEnaney (University of California at Berkeley)

“Testimonial Listening: Indexical Meanings of Material Sound”

Years ago, John Beverley defined testimonio as “a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form.” Although he and others would later challenge whether or not testimonio should be thought of as a novel—that is, as cognate with that form and thus the reading and political practices associated with the literary institution— no one in the genre’s decades-long history has questioned why testimonio should necessarily take printed form, nor what sound might contribute to the genre’s politics, nor what occurs in the processes of entextualization that mute the spoken recordings that give rise to the book. Drawing from new research in the field of linguistic anthropology, this talk takes up the example of testimonio and other tape-to-text works (from Rigoberta Menchú, Studs Terkel, and others) in order to rethink the role of sound in literature. More broadly, it hopes to model an interpretative practice keenly attuned to material sound’s semiotic resources rather than hear sound as a supplement, limit, or negation of meaning.

Respondents: Guillermo Luppi (Duke-Music), Marcelo Noah (Duke-Romance Studies)

5:05 Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY Albany)

“Face à l'Opinion: Echoes of Impunity in Argentina and Haiti”

In the 1990’s Haitian journalist and broadcaster Jean Dominique hosted Argentine human rights lawyer Rodolfo Matarrollo and Nora Cortiñes of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who drew comparisons between their countries and found resonances in human rights violations and ongoing battles against impunity. These interviews allow us to listen in on the making of transnational, South-South efforts to challenge state violence and authoritarianism. Dominique was widely known in Haiti as a fiery and outspoken critic of corruption and advocate for the country’s working people. From 1957 until his untimely assassination in 2000, he broadcast thousands of interviews with Haitian political and literary figures and analyses of Haitian politics. His program also looked beyond Haiti to developments in Latin America and the Caribbean and in so doing encouraged Haitians to situate their predicaments in regional and comparative perspective. The presentation draws from recently digitized materials from the Radio Haiti-Inter Collection at Duke University and aims to decenter US or Euro-centric scholarship on radio, dictatorship and the Cold War.

Respondents: Laura Wagner (Radio Haiti Project Archivist), Ayanna Legros (Duke-History)

6:05 Conversation with artist-activist collective LASTESIS (Chile).

Creators of “Un violador en tu camino.” Moderator: Elia Romera-Figueroa (Duke-Romance Studies)

[CANCELLED]