Apologies for crossposting.

Call for Papers: The Soundtrack

Special Issue: ‘Sounding South Asia: From Silence to Noise’

We invite abstracts of 300–500 words by 15 October 2022 at the latest.

Abstracts can be mailed to [log in to unmask]

View the full CFP here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-soundtrack#call-for-papers

Co-edited by Shweta Khilnani, Ritwick Bhattacharjee and Saikat Ghosh

For Don Ihde, as long as humans find themselves living in and breathing
through air, sound becomes, for them, an existential singularity. In fact,
this air itself, Ihde continues, is ‘not neutral or lifeless’ but finds
animation in and with ‘sound and voice’. It is, finally, this vibrant tract
of air (for what else is sound?) which relates and marks the human in its
existential prospects by not only producing an ambience of the world but
also, simultaneously, being subjected to reciprocal manipulation by humans
who invariably seek constructive teleologies.

The active manipulation of sonic regimes, in a sense, weaves together
auditory and other sensory experiences materialized through the
intersection of media and technology. Obviously, one need not restrict the
technological to the modern and see it, as Heidegger would have it, within
the prospects of its techne. Nevertheless, as soundscapes do become
increasingly
mediated by respectively advancing forms of technology, the question that
needs asking is: how do they influence our ability to hear and respond to
sound? The affordances of sound-based technologies allow hitherto ignored
sounds and silences to materialize within novel forms of mediatized
narratives, turning largely silent cultures of communication into
multisensory experiences.

Outside of such mediated curations, sonic patterns also aid in constituting
the dynamic of civic and community lives in populous spaces. In such
instances, the spatial order is propelled towards intersecting levels of
crises by the subjective experience of disruptive sonic patterns. These
patterns themselves emerge from cultures and practices nurtured and
validated within aspirational and competitive frames of collective life.
But they are registered in the civic consciousness as noise, nuisance and,
infrequently, even as indivisible remainders of affects that cannot be
fully accommodated within the present order. These sounds, however, are not
empty punctuations; in fact, they interrupt the abstract flow of clock time
with narratives, both real and imagined.

Through this special journal edition, we wish to study these constitutive
roles of sonic imaginations and how they ‘rework culture through the
development of new narratives, new histories, new technologies and new
narratives’ (Sterne). The larger context of this effort is the recent
social and cultural transformations in South Asia, reflected in its
emerging spaces, its continuously negotiated and redefined spatialities,
and the soundscapes that have come to characterise such dynamics.
Contemporary South Asia offers experiences and concepts that are ulterior
to the conventional discourses of urbanization or gentrification. Political
mediations, resettlements of industry and labour, and the continuous
development of local infrastructure in provinces as well as metropolises
are often translated into kaleidoscopic sonic patterns of life that are far
from settled in any historical sense of the term. Neat distinctions between
urban and non-urban spaces are not even available within municipal
jurisdictions. Hence, the sense of order is both fluid and fragile.

The abstracts can pertain to the following list of possible subjects.

However, they don’t have to be limited to these areas by any means:

• Urban soundscapes

• Sonic dimensions of public piety

• Curated sonic environments/ sonic mediations

• Sound and the law

• Viral sounds

• Invisible/underground sounds

• The mythopoetics of sound.

Guest editors

Shweta Khilnani is an assistant professor of English at SGTB Khalsa
College, University of Delhi. Her Ph.D. dissertation is on the nexus
between the literary, the affective and the political with respect to
digital narratives. She is interested in the study of popular and visual
cultures. Among her publications are a co-edited anthology titled Science
Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms, Imagining
Worlds, Mapping Possibilities: Select Science Fiction Stories (2020) and
Laughing Matters: Stand-up Comedy and Enjoyment in Late Capitalism (2020),
besides several academic papers and book chapters.

Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor at the Department of
English, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi. His
research has been located around fantasy, philosophy, phenomenology, horror
fiction, science fiction, Indian English novels and disability studies. He
is the author of Humanity’s Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy and a
co-editor for Horror Fictions of the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and
Representations (with Saikat Ghosh) and What Makes it Pop? Introduction to
Studies in Popular Fiction (with Srinjoyee Dutta). He has two upcoming
books: Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms
(co-edited with Shweta Khilnani) and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject:
Representing Disability in Short Fiction (co-written with Someshwar Sati
and G. J. V. Prasad). He has been awarded the Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee
Memorial award for his essay titled ‘Politics of translation: Disability,
language, and the inbetween’ published in the book Disability in
Translation: The Indian Experience.

Saikat Ghosh is an assistant professor of English at SGTB Khalsa College,
University of Delhi. He has taught courses on Marxist cultural theory,
popular fiction, modernism and psychoanalysis. He is the co-editor of
Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and
Representations. He writes extensively on the politics of higher education.

General Editor

Benjamin Wright

University of Windsor, Canada

[log in to unmask]

-- 
Judith Schofield | Marketing Executive (she / her)
A: Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Rd, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 3JG, UK
T: +44 (0)117 9589910
W: www.intellectbooks.com
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/latest-catalogues>

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the MUSICOLOGY-ALL list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=MUSICOLOGY-ALL&A=1

This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/MUSICOLOGY-ALL, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/