Audible Empire ─ Music, Global Politics, Critique

Audible Empire rethinks the processes and mechanisms of empire and shows how musical practice has been crucial to its spread around the globe. Music is a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation, and the contributors highlight how it has been circulated, consumed, and understood through imperial logics. These fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography, and include topics such as the affective relationship between jazz and cigarettes in interwar China; the sonic landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border; the critiques of post-9/11 U.S. empire by desi rappers; and the role of tonality in the colonization of Africa. Whether focusing on Argentine tango, theorizing anti-colonialist sound, or examining the music industry of post-apartheid South Africa, the contributors show how the audible has been a central component in the creation of imperialist notions of reason, modernity, and culture. In doing so, they allow us to hear how empire is both made and challenged.

Contributors: Kofi Agawu, Philip V. Bohlman. Michael Denning, Brent Hayes Edwards, Nan Enstad, Andrew Jones, Josh Kun, Morgan Luker, Jairo Moreno, Tejumola Olaniyan, Marc Perry, Ronald Radano, Nitasha Sharma, Micol Siegel, Gavin Steingo, Penny Von Eschen, Amanda Weidman.

Ronald Radano is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author ofLying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music.

Tejumola Olaniyan is Louise Durham Mead Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author ofArrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics.