CSAS Sound and South Asia Conference

Please be aware that day two of this conference (October 8) meets at the U-M Ross School of Business, Room 1240.

The Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) is pleased to announce that we will be holding an international conference on “Sound and South Asia” in October 2016. Whereas the study of what we hear has conventionally been reserved for the medical specialist, the acoustic engineer, and the ethnomusicologist, in recent years the life of sounds – from the most refined of classical music to the most irritating of street noises – has become a topic for disciplines as diverse as history, law, economics, performance studies, film studies. Sound studies, now a burgeoning field, has often focused on Europe and the United States, leaving regions such as the Indian subcontinent outside of its purview, while within South Asian studies, the aural has arguably been neglected as an analytic, in comparison to the rich and diverse scholarship on the visual. This conference, drawing on recent developments in both sound studies and South Asian studies, seeks to remedy this relative absence by engaging scholars across these fields.

This two-day conference will bring together scholars from India and the United States to explore and answer several interrelated questions. How does sound become a commodity in South Asia, whether through its purchase in music stores or through its theft in digital arenas? How do the instruments through which we receive sound, from seemingly optional technologies like the radio to expensive medical technologies like the hearing aid, shape our understandings of the social worlds that we inhabit? What might we learn from studying sound in performance contexts that are not solely focused on music, such as the Urdu poetry recitation known as the mushaira or the Tamilian dance forms of sadir and bharatanatyam? And might South Asian film and moving image media, with their distinctive song-and-dance traditions, provide a distinctively subcontinental ideal for the use of sound? In keeping with these guiding questions, the conference is organized around four major themes: instruments of sound; sound in performance; sonic commodities; and the sound of images.

We look forward to welcoming Jayson Beaster-Jones (University of California, Merced), Corey Creekmur (University of Iowa), Vebhuti Duggal (Sarai-CSDS, India), Michele Friedner (Stony Brook University), Linda Hess (Stanford University), Isabel Huacuja Alonso (California State University, San Bernardino), Neepa Majumdar (University of Pittsburgh), Madhuja Mukherjee (Jadavpur University, India), Davesh Soneji (University of Pennsylvania), Pavitra Sundar (Hamilton College), Nathan Tabor (Western Michigan University), and Amanda Weidman (Bryn Mawr College).

This conference was made possible by generous support from Ranvir and Adarsh Trehan and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, with additional support from the: School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Departments of Communication Studies, History, English Language and Literature, and Screen Arts and Cultures; the Global Media Studies Initiative; and U-M Initiative on Disability Studies.

A schedule and a list of speakers are available here: http://ii.umich.edu/csas/news-events/events/conferences.html