The Sonic Episteme

aw_product_id: 
25984271783
merchant_image_url: 
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9781/4780/9781478006640.jpg
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
20.99
book_author_name: 
Robin James
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
Duke University Press
published_date: 
02/12/2019
isbn: 
9781478006640
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Entertainment > Music > Music theory
specifications: 
Robin James|Paperback|Duke University Press|02/12/2019
Merchant Product Id: 
9781478006640
Book Description: 
In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme-a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics-employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyonce's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

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