Conventional academic writing is limited. It often precludes the complexities, nuances, contexts of our social worlds, much of the knowledge we encounter through research. Experimental creative writing enables other ways of knowing, other understandings: it reveals our sensory experiences, our gaze, our positionalities; it humbles us and connects us to our academic communities and other audiences. From Zora Neale Hurston’s (1935) Mules and Men, to the 1980s/1990s ‘literary turn’ in anthropology and ethnomusicology, to explorations of ordinary lives (e.g., Lortat-Jacob 1995), form (e.g., Taylor 1998), and embodied experience (e.g., Hahn 2007, Aduonum 2022), academics have grappled with the difficulties of capturing the complexity of people’s lives through creative writing.

 

The aim of this conference is to explore the aesthetic, epistemological, methodological, phenomenological, and ethical issues that experimental writing engenders in music ethnographies and other musicological and ethnographic texts. These may relate to experimental academic writing and affect; phenomenological evocations of sensory experiences, vulnerabilities, violence, human and non-human points of view; dialogue, collaboration and polyvocality; autoethnographies and memoirs that narrate personal stories with a critical positionality and political, conceptual or other perspective that goes beyond the personal; speculative fiction, Afrofuturism and science fiction; authorial and narrative points of view; storytelling and care.

 

Where might we place creative writing in our ethnographic and musicological toolboxes? How might experimental creative writing reproduce or decentre oppressive power dynamics?  For example, by explicating violence, or by reinforcing or moving away from acritical, reflexive, ‘me-search’ of the privileged in ethnographic creative writing? How do notions of academic credibility, evidence, and creative writing intersect? What relationships might there be between experimental creative writing and more conventional academic analysis and academic publishing spaces? Is there space for experimental creative writing in academic contexts without critical commentary? What can we learn from methodological strategies, such as Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’ which attempts ‘to represent what we cannot’ (Hartman 2008, 11)? What ethical issues does experimental academic writing present?

 

For this online, one-day conference, we welcome experimental as well as more conventional interventions from any discipline that provoke conversations about the possibilities afforded by creative writing in ethnographic and musicological writings (with examples, where appropriate). These may be short or longer experimental or conventional interventions in distinct formats of up to 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes of questions), panels of 3 related interventions (90 mins in total including questions), as well as roundtable discussions of 4–5 shorter interventions (10 mins each + 20 mins questions).

 

Please do email Hettie Malcomson – h.malcomsonsoton.ac.uk

 – if you would like to discuss possible ideas, creative forms of participation or other potential interventions relating to the conference theme prior to submission of proposals.

 

Abstracts for individual interventions should be no more than 300 words. For panels and roundtables, please send paper abstracts of no more than 300 words each, together with a panel/roundtable description of no more than 100 words.

 

All abstracts should be submitted by 16 September 2024. The form for submitting proposal abstracts can be found at BFE Autumn 2024 Abstract Submission Form. Please note that all presenters must be 2024 members of the BFE (i.e., members at the time of the conference).

 

Abstracts will be peer reviewed and selected on the basis of how well and how closely they engage with the conference theme. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 15 October 2024.

 

BFE conferences are run in accordance with the BFE Conference Code of Conduct. By taking part in a BFE conference, you agree to be bound by this code.

 

Hettie Malcomson (University of Southampton) [she/her/they/them]

 

Hettie Malcomson (University of Southampton) [she/her/they/them]

Cassandre Balosso-Bardin (KU Leuven) [she/her]

Hettie Malcomson (University of Southampton) [she/her/they/them]

Cassandre Balosso-Bardin (KU Leuven) [she/her]

Erin Johnson-Williams (University of Southampton) [she/her]

Liz Gre (University of Southampton) [she/her/they/them]

Stina Homer (Open University) [she/her]

Lea Hagmann (University of Bern) [sie/ihr/ihre/ihres/ihrer/ihren/ihrem]

 

Aduonum, Ama Oforiwaa (2022) Walking with Asafo in Ghana: An Ethnographic Account of Kormantse Bentsir Warrior Music. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press)

Barz, Gregory F. & Timothy J. Cooley (eds) (2008 [1997]) Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2nd Edition) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Fassin, Didier (2014) 'True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction', American Ethnologist, 41(1); 40-55.

Green, Emily H. (2020) 'How to Read a Rondeau: On Pleasure, Analysis, and the Desultory in Amateur Performance Practice of the Eighteenth Century', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 73(2); 267-325.

Hahn, Tomie (2007) Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press).

Hartman, Saidiya (2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Hartman, Saidiya (2008) 'Venus in Two Acts', Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2); 1-14.

Hurston, Zora Neale (1935) Mules and Men. (New York: Harper Perennial).

Isbell, Billie Jean (2010) Finding Cholita. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).

Le Guin, Elisabeth (2013) The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain. (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Lortat-Jacob, Bernard (1995) Sardinian Chronicles. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Mackinlay, Elizabeth (2019) Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. (Cham: Springer ).

Malcomson, Hettie (2023) Danzón Days: Age, Race, and Romance in Mexico. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

Narayan, Kirin (2019) Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Orloff, Carolina (ed.) (2024) Explorers Dreamers and Thieves: Latin American Writers in the British Museum (Edinburgh: Charco Press).

Pandian, Anand & Stuart Mclean (2017) Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. (Durham: Duke University Press).

Taylor, Julie (1998) Paper Tangos. (Durham: Duke University Press).

Toliver, S.R. (2021) Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork. (London: Routledge).

Wolf, Richard K (2014) The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).