Seachanges brings together original essays examining human and cultural mobility from a musical perspective. Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. But hearing past musicking that took place in diaspora and foreign lands requires new methodologies designed to center unsettled lives and ephemeral practices in history.
Employing interpretive strategies from musicology, ethnomusicology, historical performance practice, sociolinguistics, and cultural history, the contributors intentionally complicate national and regional accounts of music from 1550 to 1800. Repertorial subjects include Spanish guitar music in Italy, Italian songs in Bohemia, Turkish songs in France, Jewish rituals on Corfu, Jesuit hymns in the Greek Archipelago, and Ottoman court music; further chapters recover the experiences of Indigenous musicians in colonial Latin America, the diaspora of Neapolitan singers, fictional cartographies of Baroque opera, and the careers of enslaved Black musicians in Venice and pre-revolutionary Haiti. They promote a new theoretical vocabulary that coalesces around orality, voice, performers, and performance as matters to foreground in mobility studies.
Seachanges illustrates how musical microhistories can address mobility at the macro level of Mediterranean and Atlantic Studies while respecting the tempo of individual human lives and musical timeframes.
In the first book to use fiction as theory, Barbara L. Estrin reverses chronological direction, beginning with contemporary novels to arrive at a re-visioned Shakespeare, uncovering a telling difference in the stories that script us and that influence our political unconscious in ways that have never been explored in literary-critical interpretations. Describing the animus against foreign blood, central to the dynamic of the foundling and lyric plots that form the nexus of her study, Estrin describes how late modern writers change those plots. Reading backward through the theoretical lens of their revisions allows us to rethink the Shakespeare we thought we knew. That innovative methodology, in turn, encourages us to read forward again with different tellings, ones that challenge the mythological homogeneity of the traditional classifications and that suggest new formulaic paradigms.
With close readings of four contemporary novels and three Shakespeare plays, Estrin identifies the cultural walls that contribute to political gate-keeping as she chronicles the connection between plot variations and gender revisionism in the work of Caryl Phillips, Liz Jensen, Anne Michaels, and W.G. Sebald, as well as two film-makers (Mona Hatoum and Mieke Bal) who demonstrate an understanding that mythical repercussions prove dangerous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries even as they suggest how the heritage shaping their work, and to which they are themselves drawn, in turn proposes an alternative Shakespeare, one who frees us to ask other questions: At the time that the nation state was beginning to coalesce, what does Shakespeare’s frequent use of the foundling plot and his significant variations portend? How does his infusion of a revised lyric dynamic in The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Winter’s Tale change our reading of plays where the two plots coalesce as they do in the contemporary novels that shape Estrin’s late modern interpretations? All the works in this study share the underlying premise that the connection between cultural origins and political destinies is reciprocal and that it is necessary and possible to transform the constructs—in memory and imagination—that continue to shape our lives.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In 1635, as directed by her confessor so that he might understand “the state of her soul,” Margaret Van Noort, a lay sister of the royal convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Brussels, composed her spiritual autobiography. This text was followed by two diaries in 1636 and 1637 recording the workings of her inner life and relation to God, and reflecting the cosmopolitan Catholic tradition of her homeland. Now gathered in this volume, these works illustrate Margaret’s development from a troubled young lay sister into a woman of spiritual experience and authority.
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