Acoustics of Empire

Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century

Peter McMurray, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

376 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-755379-4 (ISBN)

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Music and sound studies have increasingly turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought in recent years, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, political, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire.

Acoustics of Empire provides a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the long nineteenth century through the lens of geopolitical power, the authors recover a sonic history that is irrefutably entangled with questions of imperial power and colonial rule. This volume brings together historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to consider topics ranging from Indian music treatises and vocal practices in Brazil to Egyptian traffic noises and stethoscopes-as-props in South Africa. Across its chapters more broadly, it also draws attention to a period when Euro-American academic disciplines like musicology and linguistics were created, shaped by the imperial contexts in which they emerged. These intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.

Peter McMurray is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Introduction: Imperial Sounds, c. 1797
Peter McMurray and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

PART I. INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITIES
1. Grappling All Day: Towards Another History of Telegraphy
Alejandra Bronfman

2. Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors' Cries
Nazan Maksudyan

3. Listening to Infrastructure: Traffic Noise and Classism in Modern Egypt
Ziad Fahmy

PART II. AURAL EPISTEMOLOGIES
4. Colonial Listening and the Epistemology of Deception: The Stethoscope in Africa
Gavin Steingo

5. Epistemological Jugalbandi: Sound, Science, and the Supernatural in Colonial North India
Richard David Williams

6. Ramendrasundar Tribedi and a Sonic History of Race in Colonial Bengal
Projit Bihari Mukharji

PART III. MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS
7. Cosmopoiesis: Stories Sung of the Equatorial Gulf of Guinea, 1817
James Q. Davies

8. Listening to Korea: Audible Prayers, Boat Songs, and the Aural Possibilities of the U.S. Missionary Archive
Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang

9. Listening through the Operatic Voice in 1820s Rio de Janeiro
Benjamin Walton

10. Ethnography and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century France
Sindhumathi Revuluri

PART IV. SILENCE AND ITS OTHERS
11. The Anacoustic: Imperial Aurality, Aesthetic Capture, and the Spanish-American War
Jairo Moreno

12. pee ä wee, an Outrageous Clatter, and Other Sounds of Acclimatization
Alexandra Hui

13. Gandhi's Silence
Faisal Devji

Afterword: Sound in the Imperial Archive
Elleke Boehmer

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	13.06.2024
Zusatzinfo	26 photos
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	150 x 226 mm
Gewicht	544 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-755379-6 / 0197553796
ISBN-13	978-0-19-755379-4 / 9780197553794
Zustand	Neuware