Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation is a significant edited volume that critically explores issues surrounding musical repatriation, chiefly of recordings from audiovisual archives. The Handbook provides a dynamic and richly layered collection of stories and critical questions for anyone engaged or interested in repatriation or archival work. Repatriation often is overtly guided by an ethical mandate to ""return"" something to where it belongs, by such means as working to provide reconnection and Indigenous control and access to cultural materials. Essential as these mandates can be, this remarkable volume reveals dimensions to repatriation beyond those which can be understood as simple acts of ""giving back"" or returning an archive to its ""homeland."" Musical repatriation can entail subjective negotiations involving living subjects, intangible elements of cultural heritage, and complex histories, situated in intersecting webs of power relations and manifold other contexts. The forty-eight expert authors of this book's thirty-eight chapters engage with multifaceted aspects of musical repatriation, situating it as a concept encompassing widely ranging modes of cultural work that can be both profoundly interdisciplinary and embedded at the core of ethnographic and historical scholarship. These authors explore a rich variety of these processes' many streams, making the volume a compelling space for critical analysis of musical repatriation and its wider significance. The Handbook presents these chapters in a way that offers numerous emergent perspectives, depending on one's chosen trajectory through the volume. From retracing the paths of archived collections to exploring memory, performance, research goals, institutional power, curation, preservation, pedagogy and method, media and transmission, digital rights and access, policy and privilege, intellectual property, ideology, and the evolving institutional norms that have marked the preservation and ownership of musical archives-The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation addresses these key topics and more in a deep, richly detailed, and diverse exploration.

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9780190659806

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This anthology might serve as a starting point for more careful use of the term repatriation and its sister concepts of decolonization and rematriation. * Monique Giroux, Ethnomusicology *

Author Information

Frank Gunderson is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University. His research interests include African and African diasporan history, musical labor, sonic repatriation, biographical approaches, human rights, and documentary film. He is an active member of the African Studies Association (ASA), the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). He is editor of the SEM academic journal Ethnomusicology, and has also served as the journal's Film, Video, and Multimedia Review Editor. He has published articles and reviews in Africa Today, History and Anthropology, Soundings, and African Music, and has twice been a guest editor of the journal World of Music. Robert Lancefield leads digital work at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. A former president of the Museum Computer Network (MCN), the organization for people who do digital work in museums, Lancefield chairs the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Council of Affiliates. Rob's Wesleyan University MA thesis considered the repatriation of recorded sound and the cultural meanings of intangible cultural documentation. His PhD dissertation examined how ideas about musical bodies and voices lent false credence to ideas of orientalized difference. Formerly a professional musician and recording engineer, Rob performed widely with Talking Drums, a US ensemble of Ghanaians and Americans. Bret Woods is an ethnomusicologist, author, filmmaker, and theoretician whose work explores music, media, and narrative through the lenses of mediology, anthropology, and social genre theory. Their main areas of focus are digital media studies, narratives and languages, performance and dissemination (through engagement of community and technology), and traditional musics. Bret is an active proponent of ""ethnomediology,"" their approach to studying expression and interaction mediated through access to archives, digital technologies, and the Internet. Bret's research explores engagement in and negotiation of traditions globally and locally throughcontemporary media.

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