Sidra Lawrence, associate professor of ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University, presents "Sonic Intimacy and Everyday Solidarities in a West African Village." This lecture is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
In this talk Lawrence explores the connections between racialized gender ideologies, sonic performativity, and feminist geopolitics among Dagara women in northwestern Ghana, West Africa. Based on ethnographic research, the speaker will discuss movement, gesture, dance, song and the everyday soundworlds of Dagara women as modes for developing sonic intimacies. Seeking an indigenous politics of solidarity, Lawrence listens to sounds and sensuous engagements that are often indirect, inaudible or performative — gossip, laughter, teasing, ululating — and suggest that they constitute political dimensions of intimacy, love, labor and community-building.
Sidra Lawrence presents several examples from her work with Dagara women, examining a range of sonic performativities, each centering on the individual lives of Dagara women, and their relationships to each other. The strategies that rural Dagara women employ to meet their political goals, express their social, material and emotional needs, and build intimate engagements do not always coincide with dichotomous notions of power/resistance, nor do they proceed from within the frameworks of organized social movements. Lawrence posits that sonic performance is a primary way through which women build coalitions, establish networks of creative agency, and change the contours of their lives. She also suggests that we attune to an indigenous politics of solidarity between Dagara women that has political and material consequences, though it is formed in a modality that is indirectly articulated, and is not synonymous with the language of social progress. By witnessing everyday sonic productions as transformative, we conceptually expand feminist praxis to be grounded in indigenous expressions, idioms and ideologies.
Sidra Lawrence is a percussionist and an associate professor of ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. She received a PhD in Ethnomusicology and a doctoral portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work utilizes an intersectional approach to address the ways that race, gender and sexuality shape meaning in the music and soundworlds of Africa and the African diasporas.
Her forthcoming book, Everyday Solidarities: African Feminism and Sonic Intimacy, based on ethnographic research in Ghana and Burkina Faso, explores sonic performativity as a mode of articulating an indigenous feminist politics. Her most recent work explores the relationships between trauma, audibility and justice. She has publications in Feminist Studies, Ethnomusicology, African Music, Africa Today, The Senses and Society, and The Latin American Music Review. She also has a chapter included in Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism and Archival Knowledge. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the West African Research Association. She has received awards for her presentations from the Society for Ethnomusicology’s African Music Section, and the Section on the Status of Women, as well as a publication award from the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce.
Lectures in Musicology is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
Lectures are held Mondays at 4 p.m. in the 18th Avenue Library, 175 W. 18th Ave. (Music/Dance Library, second floor, room 205). These events are free and open to the public. Campus visitors, please use either the Tuttle Park Place Garage or the Ohio Union South Garage. All other garages in the vicinity of the 18th Ave. Library are closed to visitors before 4 p.m.
All events are subject to change.