scholarly journals Music Theory and the White Racial Frame

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. Ewell

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this paper, a critical-race examination of the field of music theory, I try to come to terms with why this is so. I posit that there exists a “white racial frame” in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Bravman

In September 1987, early in my research at the Kenya National Archives, I came across a collection of photographs taken by a British missionary during the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection contained nearly 250 photos of the terrain and people of Kenya's Taita Hills, where I would soon be going for my fieldwork. I pored over the photo collection for a long time, and had reproductions made of twenty-five shots. The names of those pictured had been recorded in the photo album's captions. Many of the names were new to me, though a few WaTaita of the day who had figured prominently in the archival records were also captured on film. When I moved on to Taita in early 1988,1 took the photographs with me. Since I would be interviewing men and women old enough either to remember or be contemporaries of the people in the pictures, I planned to show the photos during the interviews. At first I was simply curious about who some of the people pictured were, but my curiosity quickly evolved into a more ambitious plan. I decided to try using the photographs as visual prompts to get people to speak more expansively than they otherwise might about their lives and their experiences.In the event, I learned that using the photographs in interviews involved many more complexities than I had envisaged in my initial enthusiasm. I found that I had to alter the expectations and techniques I took to Taita, and feel out some of the limitations of working with the photographic medium. I had to recognize the power relations embedded in my presence as a researcher in Taita, in my position as bearer of images from peoples' pasts, and in the photos themselves. I found, too, that I needed to come to grips with a number of issues about the politics of image production, and the historical product of those politics: the bounded, selected images that are photographs. Finally, I had to address some of my own cultural assumptions about photography and how people respond to pictures, assumptions that my informants did not necessarily share.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-72
Author(s):  
Thomas Waters

This chapter reveals the difficulties of convincing the people to discard their ‘superstitions’. However, this change was slow to come and was not brought about by reason or enlightenment. Between about the 1830s and 1860s, campaigners against superstition strove to convince their compatriots that witchcraft was risible nonsense. These campaigners failed because ridding people of their occult beliefs is far harder than many non-believers imagine. It was not social activism but the growth of professional policing that stopped mobs from attacking eccentric, vulnerable, and usually innocent people. Alleged witches were somewhat safer, but knowledge of the occult's finer details remained rife.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131
Author(s):  
Ailsa Barker

Missional hermeneutics is the interpretation of Scripture as it relates to the missionary task of the church. Four elements comprise a missional hermeneutics: 1) the missional trajectory of the biblical story being the foremost element, which also underlies the other three, 2) a narrative throughout Scripture centered on Christ and intended to equip the people of God for their missional task, 3) the missional context of the reader, in which attention moves from the task of equipping to the community being equipped, a community that is active, and 4) a missional engagement with culture and the implications thereof. Through the life of God’s people an alternative is offered, together with an invitation to come and join. Because the separation of theology from the mission of the church has distorted theology, all theology needs to be reformulated from the perspective of missio Dei and from the realization that the church is a sent community, missional in its very being. A missional hermeneutics bears implications upon the congregation, worship, preaching, discipleship, education, ministerial training, and the missionary task in multicultural contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
Andrés Kalawski ◽  
Cristián Opazo
Keyword(s):  
Tear Gas ◽  
To Come ◽  

The Chilean police keep firing pellets and tear gas bombs in the streets, blinding and injuring people by the hundreds. The people keep demonstrating. Two months before the protests of October 2019, a problematic documentary play, Animales invisibles, while distorting the genre, prophesied what was to come precisely in the way it departed from the documentary.


The Puritans ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 144-171
Author(s):  
David D. Hall

This chapter addresses the Puritan version of a “reformation of manners” or moral reform, situating it within a larger anxiety about “decline.” As those who signed the Covenant of 1596 surely knew, perceptions of “decline” had prompted fast days in Scotland ever since the 1560s. Several of these exercises in repentance and covenanting were means to the end of a firmer alliance between a Protestant state church and a monarchy (or civil state) susceptible to Catholic or more moderate tendencies. This was the purpose of the Negative, or King's, Confession of 1580/81, when the young James VI and most of the political class pledged never to allow “the usurped tyranny of the Roman Antichrist” to return to Scotland. John Knox had organized a similar event in 1565 at a moment when the political fortunes of Mary Stuart were on the mend. Knox had called on the General Assembly to institute a countrywide fast directed against “idolatry,” with the queen as its implied target. Responding to Knox's sense of crisis, this assembly endorsed a “reformation of manners” and “public fast” as the means of “avoiding of the plagues and scourges of God, which appeared to come upon the people for their sins and ingratitude.” Simultaneously, it urged the queen to suppress “the Mass” and other “such idolatry and Papistical ceremonies.”


Phronimon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Konik

This article problematises assertions concerning the existence of a minor tradition of French wildlife documentary begun in the 1920s by Jean Painlevé and more recently contributed to through Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996). What is advanced, instead, is the importance of regarding these directors’ respective films as constituting two different minor traditions. In this regard, the impasses to which the often-surrealist features of Painlevé’s films were a response, are discussed in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature and Deleuze’s idea of modern political cinema, or minor cinema. Thereafter, focus shifts on to discussion of the different context out of which Microcosmos emerged, along with the relevance of its unique cinematography for current environmental concerns—particularly because of its capacity to precipitate what Deleuze refers to as a spiritual automaton that stands to catalyse a more ecologically-orientated people to come.


Author(s):  
Roald Hoffmann

There are sound spiritual reasons for the ecological and environmentalist perspective—for minimizing pollution and harm to ourselves, to future generations, to the earth. Are these consistent with the material reality and aspirations of chemistry and chemical industry? One would like to think they are. But what of the realities? I want to take a hard, personal look at this fundamental tension. And also search for what is special about Green or Sustainable Chemistry, facing up to the obstacles confronting the field. And, while reaching for a measure of transformation, a multifaceted Green Index, to come back to a moral perspective on our creative activities. Chemists and chemical engineers are prone to believe that the general public does not recognize the contributions that chemistry has made to our health and our standard of living. And we often cringe at the perception that others blame us (and the great industries that employ us) for fouling our own nest, the infinity of ways we have found of affecting adversely our bodies and the earth by producing on the megaton scale the unnatural. Each of these adverse opinions can be productively discussed—both with the people whose adversarial or anguished arguments chemists react to, and with the chemists’ exaggerated and defensive response to them. The facts remain that the industries that transform matter (to which chemistry is central) have flourished to an extent that is staggering. They’ve played an essential material role in prolonging life, and while not making people any happier, they have provided spiritual value. The value I’m thinking of is not in creating the materials for CDs and books, ancillary tools to spiritual satisfaction, but in providing partial, yet unprecedented knowledge of the world. And the transformative industries are also responsible for an immense quantity of hazardous waste. The scale of their fecund creative enterprise is such that the major cycles of the world are perturbed. More than half the N and S atoms in our bodies have seen the inside of a chemical factory. And C, O, and H atoms too, through agriculture, food preparation, and sewage treatment.


Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin

An enduring problem of social life is what to do about the future. Can we predict it? Can we control it? How much sacrifice are we willing to make in the present for the promise of a better future? The questions are harrowing, and agreement comes hard. The year 1921 was a time of famine in some parts of the newly formed Soviet Union. An American journalist, visiting a refugee camp on the Volga, reported that almost half of the people had died of starvation. Noticing some sacks of grain stacked on an adjacent field, he asked the patriarch of the refugee community why the people did not simply overpower the lone soldier guarding the grain and help themselves. The patriarch impatiently explained that the seed was being saved for next season's planting. "We do not steal from the future," he said. It would be too much to claim that only the human animal is capable of imagining what is yet to come, but it is difficult to believe that any other animal can have so keen an appreciation of the demands of the future. Alfred Korbzybski (1879- 1950) called man "the time-binding animal." Binding the future to the present makes sense only if understandable mechanisms connect the two. This understanding was notably missing in the writings of the anarchist-journalist William Godwin. Unlike Malthus, he could make no sense of the fluctuations of human numbers. "Population," he said, "if we consider it historically, appears to be a fitful principle, operating intermittedly and by starts. This is the great mystery of the subject.. .. One of the first ideas that will occur to a reflecting mind is, that the cause of these irregularities cannot be of itself of regular and uniform operation. It cannot be [as Malthus says] 'the numbers of mankind at all times pressing hard against the limits of the means of subsistence.'" Rather than trying to see how appearances might be reconciled with natural laws, Godwin simply said there were no natural laws. His proposal to replace law with "fhfulness" led one of his critics to comment: "Perhaps Godwin was simply carrying his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science."


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