Call for Papers:
The Journal of American Culture
Theme Issue: Music and Sound in American Culture
Music attends all aspects of American culture, reflecting its diversity, oddities and wonders and providing a distinctly complex national soundscape. This theme issue of The Journal of American Culture is devoted to demonstrating the current state of interdisciplinary investigations into music and music making from across the spectrum of American culture studies.
We welcome submissions on all traditional, regional, world, ethnic, experimental, religious, commercial, and subcultural musics in the United States. We welcome essays from a wide array of fields related to American culture studies, including but not limited to ethnomusicology, anthropology, history, sociology, economics, folklore, communications, cultural studies, and musicology. Possible topics could include (but are not limited to) issues of musical spatiality and sociality, regionalism, intangible cultural heritage and sustainability, ownership and commercialization, youth music, the politics of culture, performance, issues of racial, gender, and ethnic identity, military music and sound, film music, participation, recording, marketing, and related topics such as dance, folklore, collecting, and reception.
Part of the emphasis of this issue is to expand the conception of music in American culture studies to include the transnationality of music making of the Canadian and Mexican borderlands, the circum-Caribbean, and the global musical communities of the internet which have re-centered the very understanding of the sound, place, and distinctiveness American musical culture. We also welcome submissions on related topics such as silence and noise.
Submissions, generally 15–25 pages in length, are to be original scholarly manuscripts formatted according to MLA style guidelines using in-text citations with author’s name and page number. Endnotes and works cited should appear at the end of the paper. In light of space limitations, please avoid excessive use of endnotes.
This issue will be edited by Daniel S. Margolies (jac@vwc.edu); please direct all questions to him.
Send completed manuscripts to The Journal of American Culture at jac@vwc.edu or The Journal of American Culture, Virginia Wesleyan College, 1584 Wesleyan Drive, Norfolk, VA 23502.
The deadline for submission is December 31, 2013, and the issue will be published in March 2015.
