Barry Shank Colloquium
The McIntire Department of Music presents a colloquium by Barry Shank on Friday, March 27th, 2015 at 3:30pm in 107 Old Cabell Hall. This event is co-sponsored by the American Studies Program.
Trained in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, Barry Shank’s books include The Political Force of Musical Beauty (Duke University Press, 2014), A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), and Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). He is the co-editor of The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge, 2005)(with Andy Bennett and Jason Toynbee), and American Studies: A New Anthology (Wiley/Blackwell, 2009)(with Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines and Penny Von Eschen). He has published in such journals as American Quarterly, American Studies, boundary 2, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Radical History Review, and he has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Popular Music. His courses train undergraduate students to investigate the economic and social determinants that shape everyday life and popular pleasure while his graduate courses focus on the complex of theoretical and methodological tools that lay at the heart of interdisciplinary work. He has served as President of the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and is currently the Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University.
Paper Abstract:
The Music of Insistence
One of the most quoted passages from Stuart Hall’s work describes the purpose of studying popular culture. “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured…. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.” Throughout much of its history, popular music scholars have worked within the Gramscian framework sketched out by Hall’s assertion. We analyzed the ways in which songforms and their traditions, sounds and their timbres and rhythms, were linked to groups and their struggles. We have focused on musics of resistance.
The events of 2014 have registered the limits of traditional counterhegemonic strategies, shifting the ground beneath cultural politics. Bullets, teargas, and tanks encircle and drive away demonstrators, raising tensions to the point where speech becomes impossible. Anthems can marshal resistance, but when the tanks roll, we scatter and run. In these conditions, perhaps we need to be thinking more about the ways that popular music can build cultural foundations for counterhegemonic movements strong enough and deep enough to survive meetings with bullets, teargas and tanks. Ours is a moment when the analysis of musical beauty and its political force has become even more important. And our attention must extend beyond the music of resistance, beyond the Anthems that already move us, towards the music of insistence. For every overtly political song that inspires resistance there are songs that more delicately suture new collectives of insistence. Anthems of resistance do not emerge in isolation, but gain force through their connections with songs of insistence that tell “us how people live and love, work and play, survive and die over time,” to borrow the words of Shana Redmond. This talk will focus on works by Sly and the Family Stone and D’Angelo and the Vanguard in order to identify particular characteristics of the music of insistence.
Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA's historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda. (map) Parking is available in the central grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Rd, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner.
All programs are subject to change.
For more information please call 434.924.3052.