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Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma
Annegret Fauser and Michael A. Figueroa, editors
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Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Trauma, Survival, and Musical Commemoration
One. Ensounding Trauma, Performing Commemoration
Two. Commemorating Performance, the Cabaretesque, and History Inside Out
Three. Music Commemorating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings
Mediation, Memory, and Musical Reenactment
Four. An Anthem for the AMIA Cause
Five. Musical Memory, Animated Amnesia
Six. Say Her Name
Possibilities and Impossibilities of Commemoration
Figure 1.3. This image represents the moment of armistice, recording artillery activity with a “sound ranger” (an apparatus invented in World War I to measure enemy artillery positions). It shows the cessation of fire in the flattening of white lines, which, before 11:00 a.m., oscillated with the noise. Imperial War Museum, London, American Embassy Collection, Q 47886.