Ученые предлагают использовать концепцию долга для анализа музыкальных традиций Африки и диаспоры

The language of debt is capacious within African and Black diaspora studies. Used famously by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their 2013 manifesto, The Undercommons, it described an “aneconomic” mode of Black interdependence that exceeded the sociality available in a privatized university setting (63-65). Philosopher Achille Mbembe uses debt to describe the archive’s paradox, a tool of the state even as it witnesses histories of state violence; for Mbembe, historians who weave narratives from exhumed archival remnants are “interested in debt” (2002, 23). And longstanding questions about indebtedness continue to resonate in ethnomusicological conversations about the African continent and its diasporas, particularly regarding questions of musical theft and repatriation (Feld 1996, Ivanova 2021, Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub 2012). In this panel, we engage debt’s multifarious valences, offering the term as a materialist analytic with which to query ethnomusicology in/of Africa and its diasporas. Understanding debt as a politics of social mutuality, the panel’s first paper elucidates the dynamics of sonic indebtedness that continually entangle Yorùbá music traditions and jazz soundworlds. Exploring debt as a structured relation, the panel’s second paper uses a retrospective exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum to explore “forgetfulness” as a condition of African and Afro-diasporic acceptance into the global economic order (Vergès 2015). Thinking with debt as the ongoing reverberation of historic violences, the panel’s final paper will propose indebtedness as an ethics of collaboration with a local community whose musical hubs were displaced, in part, by their university’s expansion and the ensuing neighborhood gentrification. We are looking for up to two additional presenters to join our panel! PAPERS: “Diasporic Indebtedness: Yoruba Music, Jazz, and Aneconomic Sonic Relations” Johnson Oluwajuwon Adenuga, University of Pittsburgh “The Price of Admission: Forgetfulness as a Condition of Economic Participation” Shirley Chikukwa, Columbia University “Djunta Mon (Joining Hands): Essays in Indebted Collaboration from within the University” Ruby Erickson, Brown University Discussant: Brian Barone, Berklee College of Music Please submit abstracts to Ruby Erickson ([email protected]) by September 6.