Special Issue Edited by John Sloop, Andrew Herman, Thom Swiss, Editors Of Mapping The Beat: Popular Music And Contemporary Theory (Blackwell, forthcoming in 1997)
Relying on a reading of Stuart Hall's classic "encoding/decoding" model of communication and culture, studies of popular music have commonly placed their focus on one of three areas: institutional analyses of the production of popular music, textual analyses of the semiotics of music and sound, and ethnographic analyses of the consumption and use of musical texts in everyday life. By bracketing off production, text, and consumption, such studies have failed to appreciate the ways in which music and sound are traversed by relations of power.
For this special issue, the editors are especially interested in essays that make creative use of Jacques Attali's distinction between noise and music, viewing sound as a spatial topography as well as cultural phenomenon and seeing relations of power as located in the shifting boundary between "noise" and "music." Hence, we are interested in articles that examine the politics of location through cartographies of sound, noise, and music, combining the insights of Attali with recent developments in the cultural analyses of space, place, and identity.
The editors will also consider essays from other perspectives, although our bias will be toward analyses of the politics and power of sound.
Please send inquiries or four copies of completed 20- to 25-page essays with detachable title/author page, prepared according to The MLA Style Manual to
John Sloop
Box 1558 Station B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
sloopjm@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu
(615)-322-2988
fax-(615)-343-7918
Deadline for submissions is May 31, 1997.