Roshanak Kheshti

Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music - Postmillennial Pop Roshanak Kheshti

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: Engaging an impressive range of methodologies, Modernity s Earoffers an astute look into the world music culture industry through the lens of ethnographic entrapment and phonographic subjectivity. With sharp insight, Kheshti explores the nexus between bodies and sounds at the intersection of racial and gender identities to make a crucial point about phonographic listening as an important venue for performative and philosophical reflection. -Alexander Weheliye, author of "Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity""Review Quotes: Rich in ethnographic fieldwork, Modernity s Earis a thunderous unsettling of the gendered and racialized assumptions we make about sound and listening. Innovatively pushing the limits of queer studies and critical race studies, Kheshti stretches the listening ear and retunes theoretical approaches to consider not only the way race sounds but how it is configured as sensually other. A field-changing book for queer studies and sound studies alike. -Deborah R. Vargas, author of "Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda""Table of Contents: Acknowledgments ix Preface: Playing by Ear xv Introduction 1 1. The Female Sound Collector and Her Talking Machine 15 2. Listen, Inc.: Aural Modernity and Incorporation 39 3. Losing the Listening Self in the Aural Other 65 4. Racial Noise, Hybridity, and Miscegenation in World Music 82 5. The World Music Culture of Incorporation 108 Epilogue: Modernity s Radical Ear and the Sonic Infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston s Recordings 125 Notes 143 References 165 Index 173 About the Author"Publisher Marketing: Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early songcatchers were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the other that made them. In Modernity s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self." Contributor Bio:  Kheshti, Roshanak Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego.