Acoustemologies in Contact

"In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.

The Trouble with Knowing: Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media

Encyclopedias are interfaces between knowing and the unknown. They are devices that negotiate the middle ground between incompatible knowledge systems while also performing as dream machines that explore the political outlines of an enlightened society. Building upon the insights from critical feminist theory, media archaeology, and science and technology studies, the dissertation investigates how utopian and impossible desires of encyclopedic media have left a wake of unresolvable epistemological crises. In a 2011 survey of editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, it was reported that 87 per cent of Wikipedians identified as men. This statistic flew in the face of Wikipedias utopian promise that it was an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Despite the early optimism and efforts to reduce this disparity, Wikipedias parent organization acknowledged its inability to significantly make Wikipedia more equitable. This matter of concern raised two questions: What kinds of knowing subjects is Wikipedia designed to cultivate and what does this conflict over who is included and excluded within Wikipedia tell us about the utopian dreams that are woven into encyclopedic media? This dissertation argues that answering these troubling questions requires an examination of the details of the present, but also the impossible desires that Wikipedia inherited from its predecessors. The analysis of these issues begins with a genealogy of encyclopedias, encyclopedists, encyclopedic aesthetics, and encyclopedisms. It is followed by an archeology of the twentieth century deployment of consensus as an encyclopedic and political program. The third part examines how Wikipedia translated the imaginary ideal of consensus into a cultural technique. Finally, the dissertation mobilizes these analyses to contextualize how consensus was used to limit the dissenting activities of Wikipedia's Gender Gap Task Force. The dissertation demonstrates that the desire and design of encircling knowledge through consensus cultivated Wikipedias gender gap. In this context, if encyclopedic knowledge is to remain politically and culturally significant in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to tell a new story about encyclopedic media. It must be one where an attention to utopian imaginaries, practices, and techniques not only addresses how knowledge is communicated but also enables a sensitivity to the question of who can know