Date of event: Thursday November 14, 2019
Time and Location: 2:00-3:30pm, LAII Conference Room
Description: In New Spain, an institutional structure of merit and promotion hinged on the idea of reason as an intrinsically European attribute. This attribute differentiated ‘Europeans’ from people of mixed race claiming European status based on their skin complexion. Given the affective impulses permeating ideas about reason in New Spain, this paper considers reason in light of musico-phenomenological strategies that racialized subjects used to re-write their bodies. Such process problematizes the philosophical purview of the Enlightenment’s civilizing mission, and the historical narrative of its political project.
Biography: The work of Professor Jesús Ramos-Kittrell analyzes the relationship of cultural phenomena to the socio-political structures that organize and co-produce them. Such processes interrogate power asymmetries affecting issues of social, political, and cultural representation. His published work covers the early modern period in the Americas and more current cultural analyses of globalization. Previously, Dr. Ramos-Kittrell has served as joint faculty of musicology, ethnomusicology and Latin American Studies, at Tulane University and Southern Methodist University. He is currently assistant professor in residence of musicology at the University of Connecticut.
Sponsors: The University of New Mexico Department of Music and The Latin American and Iberian Institute
The Cruelty of Jazz: Toward a Hemispheric Politics of Sound
Rooted in concepts of affect and Empire, this paper argues that jazz operated in various 20th century Latin American settings as a vital touchstone bearing the risks and benefits of urban modernization, hemispheric geopolitics, and transnational cultural production, “cruelly” echoing the United States’ cultural, political, and economic dominance in the hemisphere and beyond.
Music from the Americas presents Versus 8
Percussion music in the Americas is one of the most exotic, visually attractive, and antique forms of expression since pre-hispanic times. Preserving, promoting and creating music for the percussion family of instruments is at the core of Versus 8’s mission through international collaboration with composers, performers, students, and cultural centers that contribute with their resources to the cycle of music, namely: creation, performance, and listening..
A Day in the Life of the Bosavi People
A 90 minute, 4K, 7.1 surround sound eco-rockumentary concert of a day in the life of the Bosavi people and their rainforest home in Papua New Guinea, directed and produced by Steven Feld and based on recordings and images from 1976-2018.
