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Abstract: This talk will listen to how musicians compress place–actual corners, stages, live performances, and the social worlds that developed them–into song. In addition to the pressing of these grounds into sound, we will listen together to how musicians also offer new spatial imaginaries that invite a different relationship to place, one that does not presume possession, but a temporary stewardship of who and what was there before. To enhance our hearing of cities as vibrant holdings of the sounds of people in passing and perpetuity, we will listen in counterpoint to songs with “non-musical” archival castaways (the detritus of record collectors, scrapbooks, oral histories, touristic collectables, etc.). By pairing songs with unexpected accompaniments, the talk has two hopes: 1. to imagine, through music, the camouflaged movements of people on the move and the things they bring with them, and 2. to work in a migratory analytical mode that moves between sound, object, and place.
Bio: Alexandra T. Vazquez in an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her research and teaching interests focus on music, popular performance, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, U.S. Latina and Latin American Studies, race and ethnicity, and feminist theory and biography. Vazquez is the author of the recently released The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022). Her previous book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Her work has been featured in such journals as small axe, American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies; and in the edited volumes Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Reggaeton, The Tide Was Always High, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. You can also find her writing on the great Celia Cruz on NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series. Vazquez is a proud graduate of the New World School of the Arts high school in Miami, Florida.
