cfp.english.upenn.edu

In current debates about the War in Iraq, it has become commonplace for politicians and journalists to conjure the specter of the Vietnam War as a means of quantifying the impact of the current war in American culture and throughout the world. Surprisingly, though, few have scrutinized these comparisons to examine the differences between the popular music of the Vietnam era and the music of the current post-9/11 era. While the Vietnam era found countless bands and musicians responding in protest to that war, there has arguably been a significantly smaller amount of contemporary musicians who have taken overt stances, in their music, about the politics of post-9/11 life, in America and elsewhere.

_“Catastrophe and the Cure”: The Politics of Post-9/11 Music_ is the title of a proposed anthology examining “post-9/11” music. Abstracts are sought for articles attempting to theorize what post-9/11 music is, if such a category can be said to exist, and what political action it takes (or needs to take), if any. Proposed articles should be theoretically engaged and should be written with an academic readership in mind. Of particular interest are abstracts that seek to extend discussions of post-9/11 music beyond the bands/musicians/albums—U2, _The Rising_, The Dixie Chicks, Toby Keith, etc.—typically associated with 9/11.
We are especially interested in abstracts on the work of underrepresented groups, such as non-white, LGBT, female, non-western, etc. bands and musicians. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

--The proliferation of post-rock/instrumental rock music in the post-9/11 era
--The widespread popularity and commodification of emo bands
--The work of non-Western bands and musicians
--The role of New York City-based bands—TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Animal Collective, Interpol, The Strokes, etc.—in constructing, or deconstructing, a politics of post-9/11 music
--The resurgent popularity of heavy metal
--The hybridization of country music and its recent embrace of hard rock and hip-hop
--The influence of _American Idol_ on popular American music
--Music representing/performing trauma and/or music as a form cultural healing
--Music as cultural/political noise or cultural/political warfare
--The significance and/or problematics of “apolitical” music in The Time of Terror
--Interrogating the “shut up and sing” ideology
--Complicating the protest/patriotism binary that informs contemporary discussions of 9/11
music
--The non-response of many musicians, particularly punk-pop bands like Blink-182, to 9/11 and
its aftermath (Also, the surprising political turn of punk-pop progenitors Green Day)
--The Internet, particularly blogging culture, supplanting music as a site of political activism
--The reunion tour, as undertaken by The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Buffalo Tom, and other pre-911 bands, as nostalgia (for a better time?)
--The live (re-)performance of “classic albums” (like Van Morrison’s _Astral Weeks_, Slayer’s _Reign in Blood_, Patti Smith’s _Horses_, and Sonic Youth’s _Daydream Nation_)

Send abstracts (no more than 500 words) of proposed articles to Dr. Joseph P. Fisher (The George Washington University) and Dr. Brian Flota (Oklahoma State University) at post911anthology@gmail.com by July 1, 2009. Abstracts should be sent as MSWord attachments in doc form, compatible with older and newer versions of Word. Please include a CV (1-2 pages) with abstract. Writers should plan for final articles to be roughly 4000 words in length.