Sepharadscape: The Sonic Phenomenology Paper

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Sepharadscape: The Sonic Phenomenology of Contemporary Sephardic Cosmopolitanism
In recent years, a somewhat US-biased academic trend revolving around the exploration of Jewish sonic landscapes has emerged as part of a broader, older effort to make sense of Jewish music in terms of a defining, enlightening element of its culture (Brook 2006, Seroussi 2009, Shelleg 2014, Silver 2014). In accordance with such endeavor, this essay deals for the first time with the acoustemology (Feld, 1996, 2012) of Sephardic cosmopolitanism from the late twentieth century to the present day. In emphasizing the interplay of its local and global sonic scapes, I shall intend to make a compelling case for the following hypothesis: the existence of an intractable link between (a) the emergence and consolidation of Sepharadscape as revolving around the epistemic modality of sound, and (b) the articulation of a de-centralized, inclusive Sephardic trans-nationalism of the Iberian Peninsula.
SEPHARDISM AND THE TECHNO-LINGUISTIC REVOLUTION OF MODERNITY
“The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity-asserts Bhabha- emphasizes … the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation …show more content…

Such theoretical discovery is crucial to the my argument in that it entails that as part and parcel of embodied cognition, sound is never just sound, but it also and always-already refers to a past and a space-time constellation of individual and collective sense-making: “acoustemology means that as a sensual space-time, the experience of place potentially can always be grounded in acoustic dimension.”

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