Pluralizing Rhythm: Music, Art, Politics

Editors: Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard
Book Series: Thamyris / Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race
Publisher: Rodopi (Amsterdam / New York)
Series Editor: Ernst van Alphen
Expected Publication: Fall 2009

This volume wishes to draw attention to the concept of rhythm as a tool in analyzing cultural objects.

In fields as diverse as music, culture, nature, and economy, rhythm can be seen as a phenomenon that simultaneously connects and divides. It suggests a certain measure with which people, practices and cultures can comply. Yet, for this very reason rhythm can also function as a field of exclusion, contestation and debate. In that sense rhythm possesses an underestimated meaning-creating potential.Whereas its connecting force is often accentuated in the aesthetic, political, and commercial usage of the term, the divisive aspect of rhythm is at least as important.

pluralizing rhythm wants to rid rhythm of its harmless, nearly esoteric, reputation as a cosmic unifier by understanding it in the light of the contemporary medial turn. This volume consists of contributions that combine the political, aesthetic, musical and theoretical dimension of rhythm. These essays consider the unifying as well as disruptive potentials of rhythm by performing a close analysis of text and objects from contemporary arts, music and politics. In short, this volume complicates, disturbs and pluralizes the notion of rhythm.

A prezi map made out of individual students projects for my course ‘Space is the Place: Literature, Music and Spatiality’