Music and crisis 2.0

Last quarter I retooled my hip-hop class; this quarter I'm overhauling the music and crisis class. I get bored teaching the same thing over and over again. When I design a course, I tend to start with a handful of big questions that I want to answer. After teaching the course five or six times, the questions get answered (to the extent they can be) and new questions arise. Of course, I make minor tweaks along the way. Once I have the new questions in a good place, I build a new course around them. Here are the questions that shaped the first incarnation of the course (another early post here) I really like the "throw-it-to-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" approach to teaching, and I think the students enjoy being part of the discovery process (I'll even ask them, "is this song/article/whatever worth discussing in a future semester?")

I don't exactly have new questions at this point: more like a new blob of potentially interconnected things. Among them: physical vs. socially constructed body; trauma and disability (and the body); organic metaphors (i.e., the body, wound) for cities; commercialization, commodification and grief.

I'm sticking with many of the same crises at this point: 9/11, the origins of hip hop, and Hurricane Katrina--mainly because I have a book proposal under consideration and I want what we cover to relate directly to the crises covered in the (proposed) book.

Here's the reading list I've concocted so far:

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The political economy of music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press.

Berger, James. 2004. “Trauma without disability, disability without trauma: A disciplinary divide.” JAC [Journal of Advanced Composition]. Special issue, part 2: Trauma and rhetoric. 24/3: 563-582.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York: Verso.

Caro, Robert. 1975. The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York: Vintage.

Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t stop, won’t stop. New York: Picador.

Forman, Murray. 2002. “Soundtrack to a crisis: Music, context, discourse.” Television & new media 3/2: 191-204.

Fox, Aaron. 1992. “The jukebox of history: Narratives of loss and desire in the discourse of country music.” Popular music 11/1: 53-72.

Fullilove, Mindy Thompson. 2004. Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America and what we can do about it. New York: One World.

Harvey, David. 2003. “The city as body politic.” In Wounded cities: Destruction and reconstruction in a globalized world. Ed. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser. New York: Berg.

Hurley, Molly, and James Trimarco. 2004. “Morality and merchandise: Vendors, visitors and police at New York City’s Ground Zero.” Critique of anthropology 24/1: 51-78.

Klein, Naomi. 2008. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan.

Krims, Adam. 2007. Music and urban geography. New York: Routledge.

Ritter, Jonathan, and J. Martin Daughtry. 2007. Music in the post-9/11 world. New York: Routledge.

Rose, Chris. 2007. 1 Dead in Attic. New York: Simon and Shuster.

Rosen, Gerald M., ed. 2004. Posttraumatic stress disorder: Issues and controversies. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Salvaggio, Ruth. 2008. “Forgetting New Orleans.” Southern literary journal. 40/2: 305-16.

Siebers, Tobin. 2001. “Disability in theory: From social constructionism to the new realism of the body.” American literary history. 13/4: 737-754.

Straus, Joseph N. 2011. Extraordinary measures: Disability in music. New York: Cambridge U. Press.

Swenson, John. 2011. New Atlantis. New York: Oxford U. Press.

Watts, Lewis, and Eric Porter. 2013. New Orleans suite: Music and culture in transition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. California Press.