RAI Ethnomusicology

RAI Blacking Lecture

10 November 2015

Council Chamber, Queen’s University Belfast

Music and Citizenship

Professor Martin Stokes, King’s College London

Citizenship debates – traditionally focused on questions about property, liberty of the person, and representation – shifted radically in the 1990s. Globalization pushed questions about ‘flexible citizenship’, about problems of inclusion and exclusion in a world of migrancy, war, and failed states. Feminist and queer movements made questions about sexual rights central to citizenship discourse, and with them the politics of feeling, emotion and care. Responses to Habermas explored the idea of counter-publics, spaces of citizenly participation involving alternative structures of emotional disclosure and recognition. Preoccupied with matters of identity in the 1990s, ethnomusicology has, arguably, been slow to respond. This lecture looks at the place of music and musicians in constructions of citizenly virtue with four foci: emotion, environment, the body, the public sphere. It springs from questions that I explored in a recent book on Turkish music (The Republic of Love, University of Chicago Press, 2010), but traces the configurations of a more general inquiry. It is also intended to refocus longstanding ethnomusicological concerns with questions of social justice, particularly those springing from Blacking’s idea of ‘soundly organized humanity’.

RSVP to Patrick Carson (p.carson@qub.ac.uk)

PROGRAMME

3pm — Council Chamber (Lanyon Building)
BLACKING REFLECTIONS:
John Baily (Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths);
Veronica Doubleday (Visiting Research Fellow, Goldsmiths);
Suzel Ana Reily (Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Campinas, Brazil)

3.30pm — Council Chamber (Lanyon Building)
RAI BLACKING LECTURE:
‘Music and Citizenship’
Professor Martin Stokes (King’s College London)

5-6pm — McMordie Hall, Music Building, School of Creative Arts, University Square
REFRESHMENTS

6-7.30pm — Harty Room, Music Building, School of Creative Arts, University Square
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY CONCERT
with music from Afghanistan, Greece, South Africa and Ireland

Hosted by the School of History and Anthropology and the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast.

Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Northern Ireland Festival of Social Sciences.