Freitag, 9. Oktober 2020 | Friday, October 9, 2020
18:00–18:20 Screening
18:20–19:00 Discussion (w/ Paul Théberge)

Abstract
Freud characterized the function of the uncanny in literature describing how it can be elicited, as in when the writer moves in the world of common reality and then "oversteps the bounds of possibility”. But what Freud did not consider was that the uncanny can be deployed as a highly profitable tool by the musical culture industries. In this paper I root the presence of this “uncanny object of race” in American popular music and explore how the culture industry has long profited on the listener’s uncanny encounter with this other in sound.

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic 33 1/3, 2019). She is completing a monograph tentatively titled “We See With The Skin": Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics. Her scholarship has appeared in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Anthropology News, Parallax, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!.