Music and Sound Studies Network
German Studies Association
48th Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA, September 26th to 29th, 2024
Deadline: February 29, 2024

The last decade has seen a wealth of scholarship exploring the intersections of music, sound, and race broadly (Eidsheim 2019; Stoever 2016; Robinson 2020; Morrison 2024) and in German-speaking cultures in particular (Móricz 2008; Wipplinger 2017; Layne 2018, Thurman 2021). These interventions, building on diverse interdisciplinary perspectives including Black Studies, Jewish Studies, and Indigenous Studies, have drawn attention to the ways that racial hierarchies are not only visualized but also heard and sounded. Indeed, by exploring the construction of the “sonic color line” in German culture, that is, the processes by which “certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds” and the way that listening practices conform to these norms (Stoever 2016), these studies have revealed how theories about racial otherness have been mapped onto concepts of harmony and dissonance, music and noise, and been used to stigmatize timbres and styles of vocalization. In so doing, they have illuminated how racialized conceptions of sound have shaped German culture over time, forcing a reconsideration of the ideals that underpin the historical discourse of music as “the most German of the arts” by highlighting their exclusions and marginalizations.

The Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association (GSA) invites proposals for papers that highlight these new directions in scholarship by considering the many ways that discourse on race and sound reflects, delineates, complicates, crosses, and interacts with German-speaking communities throughout the world. The network encourages scholarship from a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and from any historical period. Projects that focus on noise and sound as much as on music are very welcome.

Abstract submissions may consider the ways that race mediates, shapes, or guides:

-quotidian habits of listening
-acoustic media, film sound, and other digital sound technologies
-the creation and curation of sound archives
-performance cultures and reception histories
-the construction of acoustic subcultures and cultures of sonic resistance
-Racialized representations of sound in literature and visual arts
-the soundscapes of minoritized communities

Deadline: Thursday, February 29, 2024

Please email your title and abstract of about 250 words and a short bio of 150 words to Abby Anderton (Abby.Anderton@baruch.cuny.edu), David Imhoof (imhoof@susqu.edu), or Caroline Kita (ckita@wustl.edu).