Lectures in Musicology: Van My Truong, Comparative Studies

Dubravka Ugresic once wrote that "[a]n exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound….that exile is nothing but a state of searching for and recollecting sound." What if listening in exile means searching for sounds of someplace else: a familiar dialect spoken by passing strangers; a haunting rhythm or structure of song; the shape of a lamenting voice spilling from the tape player buried behind a counter at the corner market, reminding you of how far you’ve traveled and of how long you’ve been gone? What if listening in exile means having to listen from afar, from the distance of another country, or another era in history, you’ve never known yourself, only picked up in others’ muted longings for that other place and other time? This talk explores the notion of “distance listening” not exclusively as sound technique but as critical practice, particularly in relation to the diasporic listener. It takes up “distance listening” as a critical framework through which to think through conditions of diasporic loss and longing. We will explore a collection of musically diverse, though affectively connected, songs in an attempt to listen to and through the exile’s “special sensitivity to sound."

Van My Truong received her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. She is currently an ACLS postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State. Previously, she served as chief project coordinator for Yale’s Black Sound and the Archive Humanities Research Group. Her work takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to contemporary migrant life and culture, and has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Social Text and The Independent Weekly, among others, and will appear in the forthcoming anthology of essays entitled Blackstar Rising & the Purple Reign: Pop Culture and the Sonic (After)lives of David Bowie and Prince (Duke UP). With support from Yale’s Public Humanities Program, she co-founded SOUND HALL, a speaker/performance series and multimedia platform that focuses on sound and music at the intersection of personal memory and public history. She is currently working on a new archival project focusing on family photographs of the Vietnamese diaspora while completing a book manuscript entitled The Utopics of Migrant Melancholia, which examines allegories of migrant boat crossings and practices of diaspora.