Kolloquium: Black Music and Embodiment

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Black Music and Embodiment

It is commonplace to hear music lovers describe the multiple varieties of black music as forms expressive of the black body. In this talk, Ronald Radano will explore the history of such thinking, showing how it derives from a racial-economic peculiarity tracing to the US slave era. The comprehension of black music as embodied or “animated” form, in turn, would influence the conception of African musical practices when they were first documented and recorded during the German imperial era before World War I. Rather than demonstrations of antiquated ideas, these intellectual trajectories carry profound significance, informing the greater understanding of music in the 21st century.

Ronald Radano is Professor of African Cultural Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently the Berlin Prize/Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin. He has published widely on US and global black music and ethnomusicology, including, most recently, Secret Animation of Black Music: A Theory of Value (forthcoming), and, as co-editor, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke, 2016). He is presently beginning new research that focuses on the technological reproduction of African music as part of the emergence of German musical scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.