Department of English

• Friday, March 7, 2014 - 1:00pm to 6:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall 401

Fisher-Bennett Hall 401
Friday March 7, 2014

1pm opening session and musical performance (Murat Keyder, guitar, with Rachel Ellis Neyra and Tsitsi Jaji)

Panel 1 (1.30-3) Yvette Christiansë, Edwin Hill and Rachel Ellis Neyra

3pm Music and Art in Elegy for José Esteban Muñoz and Terry Adkins*

Panel 2 (3.30-4.45) Alex Weheliye and Tsitsi Jaji

5pm Reception

Theme: We sound a sweet dissonance, to hear familiar terms resonating in a cantus novus. How has the sonic register allowed the articulation of resistance to slavery; racism, homophobia and other bigotries; and the unfreedoms engendered by capitalism? If we think of Creole languages as sonically invented, born in the forced and chosen encounters of peoples in new spaces, then how might they fit on a continuum with noise, spice, hotness, blue notes, and other cacophonies, answering back to the muting power of invisible whiteness? In other words, how can we attend to the way that white flight has historically been a retreat from loud color? And how might thinking in sonic terms elucidate the historical processes at work in shifting, overlapping, and intersecting diasporas that amplify and/or interfere with solidarity?