Despite modernist precepts, digital projects that use crowdsourcing to annotate large collections of images of paintings and book illustrations with “tags” have encouraged viewers to see things in pictures and to say what they see. Both personal image tagging (ekphrastic in function) and automatic image tagging challenge in different ways the proposition that a painting as such will elide recognizable content.

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

In its attention to the undead state of American slavery, Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) appears to fulfill Stephen Best’s diagnosis of a “melancholy historicism” in recent Black cultural production. But instead, the film draws viewers into a virtual experience—and potential analysis—of the roles of both technological and environmental media (from TV, film, and cellphones to housing, ceramics, and cotton) in perpetuating, or disrupting, Black captive kinship to a state of originary loss.

This article explores the way theories of race and religion feature in the construction of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. It focuses on the writings of the nineteenth-century French intellectual Ernest Renan and the leading Eastern European Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin.

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant ( kairos ) over the temporality of the linear sequence ( chronos ). Kairos is made manifest in the literalist translations of Hölderlin by the modernist Iranian translator-poet Bijan Elahi (d. 2010). This inquiry advances our understanding of the role of syntax in constituting literary form and in shaping translation, and exposes the contingency of the translator’s decisions in every given literary juncture.

Cantology names an approach to the songish impulses that are a ubiquitous aspect of human cultures. It aims to divert our attention from the more restricted objects of musicological and ethnomusicological scrutiny by discerning song formations , conditions of possibility that define experiences of society and history along songish lines. These formations, local phenomena in cantology’s broad purview, emerge from the interactions of levels of cultural production including the performative, the discursive, the metadiscursive, and the archaeological. We outline a cantological theory, then briefly characterize four successive song formations in the West, reaching from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.

This essay proposes that current-day notions of fugitivity, understood in the terms Fred Moten proposes as a category of the irregular that escapes easy representations and predications, can undiscipline music histories in productive ways. Among these: it can inflect musicological thinking through attention to sonic remainders of haunted pasts; it can decenter understandings of the aesthetic; and it can lead to more nuanced thinking about the imbrication of music in an “undercommons” of life that refuses ever to fully sound in harmony, residing instead in a disordered space of restless, noisy sound. The essay asks, finally, how such thinking, developed by Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, and Daphne Brooks, among others, can remake aspects of musicological thinking about voice.

The attraction of objects has motivated a swerve within the humanities—a move away from texts and exegesis, linguistics, and semiotics; a move toward the body, the senses, materiality, and physiology. A musical instrument, a scientific artifact, a collection of sounds, an antique postcard: yes, all these objects are expressive and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, and in being so they can be understood to embody an epistemology, with theories and realms of knowledge written into their every contour. Or they can be understood as traces of global exchange and displacement. But what if the object is not very good, not loveable at all? Crumbling, toxic paper or banal images, with no exit from a strange historical or cultural space, perhaps an uncomfortable space to which you feel averse (or at least, feel you should disdain, as beneath contempt)? Or what if the object is misdirecting? What if it is ephemeral, like sound, something that cannot be held? These questions are woven in this essay into a reflection on the forms taken by certain loves for opera, a reflection centered on some nineteenth-century material objects that relate to act 4 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836).

This essay is about the long-standing and tenacious audile technique of listening past —that is, the discrimination of music, musical performances, and even sound amid the ostensibly broader range of vibrations conveyed by any media form. For some time, an assortment of musicians, sound artists, and theoreticians have lined up to maintain that this cognitive-discursive technique, which suppresses or diminishes the processes of mediation, is in some sense ideological: illusory, contingent, and even exclusionary. Cagean theories of sound, feminist valorizations of embodiment and presence, ecological ethics of the soundscape, tech-focused philosophies of mediation, ethnographic conceptions of aurality, and Deleuzian vibrational ontologies—all are united in their foundational skepticism. Centered on digital transfer of an early electric recording of a performance of Beethoven’s Sixth from 1927 conducted by Felix Weingartner, this essay seeks to reevaluate the political implications of listening past by drawing out its submerged relationships to the traditional historicist project of recovering what I call past listenings— lost modes of listening that are supposedly indivisible from particular spaces, historical moments, and radically situated subjectivities.

This essay presents the song “Area Code 869,” an example of a Caribbean genre known as “wilders” or “pep,” as a form of what Kodwo Eshun calls “sonic fiction.” By focusing on sonic bodies as “bodies touched by sound,” the essay suggests that “869” offers a reimagination of the historical relationship between sugar, sound, and speed in the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts, a former British sugar colony.

How has “the migrant crisis” affected musicology? What “edges” now appear, with what implications for musicology’s persistent call to historicize? This article suggests these have been more persistent questions than the current language of “crisis” might suggest. Taking some examples with the ongoing Syrian war as a backdrop, the implications of Mieke Bal’s injunction to “remember with” are explored as a route to thinking through the dilemmas of activism and compassion.

This essay considers the cultural implications of a brief period in the life of New York’s Brill Building, America’s second Tin Pan Alley, a transformative moment in R&B that involved music performed by African American artists but written by songwriters committed to “Jewish Latin.” Recorded on 45 rpm vinyl, circulated in jukeboxes and on radio in new Top 40 radio formats, this sound formed young taste, and, in the bargain, its commercial cycles produced staggered temporal segments that shaped feeling and memory for a generation. One’s sense of life history, of history itself, was time-coded by what we heard and how we heard it, with some interesting implications.

Best known for his reminiscences of artistic and intellectual life in midcentury Paris and for his chronicle of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti mission, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris also wrote obsessively about music, turning to imperfectly recalled fragments of song and opera to evoke key moments of early childhood and to explore affective relationships. This article focuses on two episodes from Leiris’s writings to demonstrate that his highly emotional and anecdotal mode of writing about music anticipates, and quite possibly influenced, the more systematic theories of voice, sound, and language of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Derrida engaged directly with Leiris in his essay “Tympan” (in The Margins of Philosophy ), which quotes at length a text by Leiris on the cognitive and relational dimensions of hearing and writing. Leiris’s experience in the 1930s and 40s developing a lexicon and grammar for the ritual language of the Dogon people of Mali, I argue, fundamentally shaped his conviction that both music and language are most communicative when they permeate and destabilize each other.

Taking inspiration from Kalle Pihlainen’s philosophy of historical representation, this essay explores some of the ways in which operatic performance can harness the ambiguity between the genre’s historicist and presentist implications to mobilize not just the difference of the past from the present but also their connection. The essay focuses on two recent examples—Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (New York, 2017) and The Industry’s Sweet Land (Los Angeles, 2020)—whose unconventional presentations critically engage such temporal complexity. Moving beyond the proscenium and crucially involving the music in their directorial visions, both couch history’s grip on the present in terms of the consequences of past actions. By self-staging their differences from mainstream opera-house productions, moreover, both explore whether opera can still aspire to sociopolitical relevance today. Though Butterfly tackles a controversial repertory staple, while the immersive and site-specific Sweet Land enlists the operatic genre itself to probe various modes of historical imagination, both expose continuities of historical racism in contemporary US culture. Their blurring of lines between past and present prevents audiences from confining racist positions to the operas’ allegedly historical plots: instead of presenting past alterity, the productions reveal transhistorical semblance. Opera thus becomes a medium for performing the multidimensionality and open-endedness of history.

This essay offers a reconsideration of Giambattista Vico’s work for scholars interested in history, sound, and aurality. It takes as its point of departure the chronological table that stands at the opening of The New Science , homing in on its blind spots, raw absences, and tangled claims to objectivity. Vico’s understanding of history relies—this essay goes on to argue—on a lively world of aural metaphors involved in the act of its writing: imaginary sounds, meaningless speech, false listenings, along with invented onomatopoeic etymologies. Such unruly sounds lead us to a crucial paradox of Viconian history, one that must confront all historians invested in retrieving and rewriting the stories of those who are lost, erased, and unrepresented: what role does imagination play in the writing of history? Can human invention, imagination, and even falsehood lead us toward new historical findings? The essay closes with a gloss of Vico’s nascent theory of the physical and aural phenomenon of laughter, presented in the Vici vindiciae as a complex pathway between humanity and animality and, what’s more, as a historical interface between incommensurable stages of creaturely life.

Like many exegetes before him, the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux regarded the lovers in the Song of Songs as allegorical fictions. Yet these prosopopoeial figures remained of profound commentarial interest to him. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs returns again and again to the literal level of meaning, where text becomes voice and voice becomes fleshly persona. This essay argues that Bernard pursued a distinctive poetics of fictional persons modeled on the dramatic exegesis of Origen of Alexandria as well as on the Song itself. Ultimately, the essay suggests, Bernard’s Sermons form an overlooked episode in the literary history of fiction.

What can biblical psalms teach us about literary devotion? An unexpected answer to that question is provided by Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (1595), a touchstone of literary criticism in its time and in ours. The argument in this essay unfolds from analysis of a single paragraph, which reveals how Sidney’s description of King David’s Psalms challenges our regnant categories in the following way: If today religion connotes fidelity or devotion to an external authority, as for many it does, and if literature entails authorial sovereignty and independent creativity (also a widespread assumption), then Sidney’s approach deviates by equating divine inspiration with poetic creativity. His celebration of variable voices and personae, in particular, undermines the distinction between fidelity and autonomy by offering the psalmist’s voice as a model of transformative self-expression.