Sponsor
Music
Co-Sponsor(s)
African and African American Studies (AAAS)
Ethnomusicology Lecture: Jessica Baker, University of Chicago
Friday, November 13,
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This talk emerges at the intersections of two nascent projects. The first concerns music and end-of-life care, in which I examine how a legacy-the sum of what endures after a life has ended-is constructed and maintained, particularly through sonic practices. The second, not entirely unrelated, examines Black middle-class aesthetics and, specifically, aspiration as a set of legacy-ensuring practices with inherently sonic dimensions.
Braiding these threads of inquiry, this talk focuses on Beyoncé's 2024 country music album, Cowboy Carter, as a collaborative collage of songs and sounds that stages a re-narrative of personal and genre legacies. Offering something notably different from her previous projects, Cowboy Carter centers on the struggles and labor of aspiration rather than strictly dancefloor celebration. It's this emphasis on effort, sacrifice, and hard work toward the explicit goal of being remembered that ties Cowboy Carter to broader questions about the context of contemporary legacy-building-specifically, the role of women's structural labor and global middle-classness.
Drawing on ethnography, deep listening, and ethnomusicological readings of Black liberation theology, I situate Beyoncé and the sonic techniques of Cowboy Carter within a history of what political theorist Joy James has referred to as "the rise of Black women through Empire." In doing so, I suggest that we can hear strains of what the distribution of the social weight of legacy-building sounds like across the Black diaspora.
This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome.
Braiding these threads of inquiry, this talk focuses on Beyoncé's 2024 country music album, Cowboy Carter, as a collaborative collage of songs and sounds that stages a re-narrative of personal and genre legacies. Offering something notably different from her previous projects, Cowboy Carter centers on the struggles and labor of aspiration rather than strictly dancefloor celebration. It's this emphasis on effort, sacrifice, and hard work toward the explicit goal of being remembered that ties Cowboy Carter to broader questions about the context of contemporary legacy-building-specifically, the role of women's structural labor and global middle-classness.
Drawing on ethnography, deep listening, and ethnomusicological readings of Black liberation theology, I situate Beyoncé and the sonic techniques of Cowboy Carter within a history of what political theorist Joy James has referred to as "the rise of Black women through Empire." In doing so, I suggest that we can hear strains of what the distribution of the social weight of legacy-building sounds like across the Black diaspora.
This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome.