Workshop | Suppressed songs, suspicious sounds: Popular music, archiving & cultural amnesia in Southeast Asia

Abstract
This is a workshop on Southeast Asian popular music, and how popular songs often have provided room for otherwise suppressed sentiments, colonial trauma, or have facilitated hopes for the better. The contributions in this workshop explore a range of suppressed sounds deemed too radical, too suspicious or too solemn and sorrowful. Some of the presentations highlight how archival practices have both led to the neglect and actively forgetting but also the rekindling of once popular songs or genres. Moreover, we aim to highlight how today’s archival practices, both state-sponsored and in the form of grassroots initiatives help (re)popularize once suppressed sounds and may give them a second lease in the hands of a new generation of listeners, which obviously may listen quite differently to these sounds.  New media and ‘new’ resources” (e.g., old vinyl, liner notes, photos, as well as the ‘diggers’ themselves) are changing the very field of knowledge and the way we listen, talk and write about these pop resources in order to come up with sound methodology and sound writings. Our workshop hence also aims to foregrounds hitherto less explored multimodal modes of dealing with the popular music archive and the ways it may help us doing sound history.

Organization
Jointly organized by the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology, KITLV and generously sponsored by the Leiden Priority Cluster Asian Modernities & Traditions.

Program
Flyer
Draft program

Limited seats
We have limited seating capacity, so in case you are interested in attending the workshop, please do contact and register: [email protected]