Cold War and Music Session, AMS 2010

Greetings Cold Warriors! Paper proposals are being accepted for this year's study group session to be held at the annual meeting of the AMS in Indianapolis. The deadline for proposals is March 1st and can be sent to me (Ryan Dohoney) at coldwarpanel2010 at gmail dot com.

CALL FOR PANEL PRESENTATIONS
The Cold War and Music Study Groups
Evening panel and discussion session
AMS Annual Meeting 2010, Indianapolis

The Cold War Sensorium: Sound, Affect, Politics

The archive of Cold War history is marked by emotionally charged rhetoric. Phrases like “the Red Scare” and “the Age of Anxiety” suggest an historical present shot through with crisis ordinariness—a longue durée of negative affect coursing through bodies politic. Other Cold War tropes—the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, homosexual suspicion, and the culture of feminine sentimentality—locate daily life as a site for the negotiation of politics, intimacy, and mortal danger. Air raid drills, political rallies, and protests, too, were defined by sonic presence, affective intensity, and political engagement.

This panel invites scholars to consider the role of sound and affect in such scenes of crisis. Panelists might consider how Cold War era events were marked by aesthetic response, how sound enabled the production of politicized emotion, or what sort of soundscapes musical performances, improvisations, recordings, and compositions delineated. The panel does not seek to assert the hegemony of political anxieties and negative affects, but will hopefully provide alternate ways of articulating how sounds were heard and felt in the postwar decades. Papers might also question how a focus on ordinary events as well as their sonic and affective environments afford a view of Cold War culture that is less totalizing and more locally descriptive.

Please send short proposals (.doc or .pdf) of no more than 250 words to coldwarpanel2010 at gmail dot com by March 1st.