[Englecturers] Professor Josh Kun Gets Published

[Matthew Snyder]

Hello Everyone:

It seems that I found out through the grapevine last month that Professor 
Josh Kun has recently published his "Audiotopia: Race, Music, and America" 
through UC Press.  In addition, Valerie Solar has announced on the graduate 
listserv that there is a spare copy of the book in the department library if 
anyone wants to take a gander.  For keeps, the book is listed at a 
remarkably accessible price of $13.57 at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520244249/qid=1134105609/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6613305-0551836?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

It is a great surprise to hear that his book is coming out after hearing 
excerpts of it from a class I took with Professor Kun on 
Critical/Experimental Writing back in 2000.

Congratulations to Mr. Frequencies.


Cheers,

Matthew Snyder

AUDIOTOPIA: Music, Race and America

Book Description:

Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border 
and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects 
popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun 
insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, 
but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of 
racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and 
listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of 
American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, 
Cafe Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli 
reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and 
enriching--a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been 
taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual 
musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of 
writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is 
no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, 
Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, Audiotopia 
forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, 
race, identity, and culture for many years to come.

>From the Back Cover:

"The range and depth of Audiotopia is thrilling. It's not only that Josh Kun 
knows so much-he knows what to make of what he knows."--Greil Marcus, author 
of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century


"With Audiotopia, Kun emerges as a pre-eminent analyst, interpreter, and 
theorist of inter-ethnic dialogue in US music, literature, and visual art. 
This book is a guide to how scholarship will look in the future--the first 
fully realized product of a new generation of scholars thrown forth by 
tumultuous social ferment and eager to talk about the world that they see 
emerging around them."--George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages: Collective 
Memory and American Popular Culture


Audiotopia : Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads) (Paperback)

by Josh Kun "IT ALL STARTED WITH A RECORD store and the Rock Island Line..." 
(more)

List Price: 	$19.95
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