Call for Papers | Yale Journal of Music & Religion | Yale University

How the Sears Catalog Disrupted the Jim Crow South and Helped Give Birth to the Delta Blues & Rock and Roll

For all of the justified ire directed at certain online retailers for their anti-competitive practices, tax evasion, labor exploitation, and so on, one fact often goes unremarked upon since it seems to fall outside the usual narratives.

Notes on Mad Listening

<p>This essay takes shape around a selection of autoethnographic scenes detailing what I call ‘mad listening.’ The notes below take a mad first-person standpoint, drawn from my own experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and generalized anxiety, among other crazed aspects of my unruly bodymind that evade diagnosis. Challenging the power that diagnoses hold—but not negating their importance for some people—I propose alternative ways of retheorizing these idiosyncratic experiences, through abstract intensities such as ‘stickiness.’ By de-medicalizing and de-pathologizing madness, my goal is to emphasize the persistent ambiguities and slippages of auditory perception that are not so easy to taxonomize. As such, I aim to chart a poetics of the perceptual glitch in relation to mad listening, without the footholds and straightjackets of psychiatric terminology. Linking mad praxis to other intersections of radical unreasoning, this essay presents further challenges to audist and phonocentric assumptions, which tend to abound where listening subjectivities are concerned. </p>

Song Studies

This series offers a platform for academic research on the multidimensional medium of song.