2016 In Review

2016 sucked, both in general and personally (for example, I lost two pets in three months of one another). But I also did a lot of work, in large part because I need to keep my job, and I’m the…

Good and Interesting Things in Music in 2016

This isn’t a “best of”–ranking is boring. This is a collection of things I liked to listen to and things worth thinking more about wrt music in 2016. Things I Liked: Bangers: Ansome, “Stowaway”. My favorite hard-driving techno banger of…

Counting it out differently: back music aesthetics in the era of financialization & biopolitics

I’m speaking as part of Connecticut College’s Afrofuturism & Social Justice symposium on Nov. 4, 2016. Here’s the full text of my talk. It’s mostly chunks of the current manuscript I’m writing, so it’s a nice preview of some of…

Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session SPEP 2016: On aesthetics as a method for the critical philosophy of race

I’ve been invited to contribute a talk to the Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session at the 2016 SPEP meeting next week. The talk argues that Gooding-Williams uses aesthetics as a method for practicing the critical philosophy of race, and then uses his…

Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema” Without All the Psychoanalytic Theory

I’m writing this to use in my lower-level classes where I want to talk about the main argument in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema,” but I don’t want to have to teach the students three years of Freud…

My 2010 Paper on Race, Breed Specific Legislation, & Policing

Back in 2010 I wrote a conference paper that argued breed specific legislation used dog breed as a proxy for human race, and was (a) an attempt to put back into the law the explicitly race-based discrimination outlawed by the 14th Amendment, such…

Thinking about dash- and body-cam videos with Robert Gooding-Williams

This October I’m speaking as part of the Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session at SPEP. Part of my talk discusses his work on the Rodney King video. Given the current and extremely local-to-me debates about whether and to whom police do…

Introduction to The Sonic Episteme (or maybe The Sonic Hypothesis?)

I’m in the middle of writing a book for Duke UP, and I thought I’d post the current version of the introduction to give y’all a sense of what I’m writing about this year. I’ve pasted the opening pages below,…

Slow Death, Sound, & Lean Ontology

  Attali argued that both postwar avant-garde art music and economic theory used the “laws of acoustics” to transform chance and indeterminacy into features rather than bugs. Both practices developed ways of positing background patterns or parameters behind foreground noise….

The political motivations for the “is music biological or cultural” question

Nature just published another entry in the “is musical preference biological or cultural?” debate. It’s getting a lot of press attention now. Scholars outside the hard sciences are pretty much (as Nick Seaver put it) “duh” about it. I fall…