TY - JOUR AU - Veal, Michael AU - Slaten, Whitney PY - 2017/04/01 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Ethnography, Sound Studies and the Black Atlantic: A Conversation Between Michael Veal and Whitney Slaten JF - Current Musicology JA - CM VL - 0 IS - 99/100 SE - Articles DO - 10.7916/cm.v0i99/100.5342 UR - https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/currentmusicology/article/view/5342 SP - AB - <p><span style="left: 90px; top: 229.435px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(1.00394);">The following discussion between Michael Veal and Whitney Slaten </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 251.105px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.969863);">emerged amidst Veal’s presentations for Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 272.775px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.956731);">in the 2015-2016 academic year. Drawing from the current research of </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 294.445px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.976239);">Veal and Slaten, as well as the recent work in sound studies, this discussion </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 316.115px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(1.00548);">explores the status of the human in black popular music studies. It begins </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 337.785px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.971797);">by tracing the significance of how Veal situates his subjects locally, yet also </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 359.455px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.976989);">in dialogue with important centers of black popular music throughout </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 381.125px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.989477);">the Atlantic. In the wake of oppressive histories that have associated black </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 402.795px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.953252);">musical expression to the permanent objectifications of slavery, the dis-</span><span style="left: 90px; top: 424.465px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.919289);">course about Fred Moten’s important analysis of Aunt Hester’s scream as </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 446.135px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(1.01218);">the supposed object’s resistance, and sound studies’ new turn to decenter </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 467.805px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(1.01625);">social categories in favor of foregrounding sounds and sonic phenomena </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 489.475px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.996778);">as objects, the second section asks the following question: how does post-</span><span style="left: 90px; top: 511.145px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.963405);">humanism juxtapose with scholarship on black music? Considering the </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 532.815px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.990418);">complexities associated with human and post-human approaches, the final </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 554.485px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.99862);">section considers how blackness and labor figure in Slaten’s ethnographic </span><span style="left: 90px; top: 578.483px; font-size: 18.3333px; font-family: serif; transform: scaleX(0.983551);">research on professional live sound engineering in New York City. </span></p> ER -