On Poptimism, Race, & Biopolitics in the Nietzsche/Wagner Beef
In my Theories of Sound & Music class we studied the Nietzsche/Wagner beef, and there are two themes I want to mark here so we can return to them later when we talk about poptimism, on the one hand, and…
Some thoughts on Goodman’s Sonic Warfare
I’m working on a chapter that critiques a lot of trendy “vibrational ontologies” as a kind of ideal theory that just replaces one old idealized model–representationalism–with a new one–acoustic resonance. Most of the chapter is about Grosz, Bennett, & Barad’s…
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,…
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