Ana Hofman
Keynote Abstract
Ethnomusicology between Past Remembrance and Future Making, 80 Years After
Eighty years after the liberation of Europe from fascism, this lecture asks what—and how—institutional practices of remembering and forgetting have shaped our disciplinary field, and which practices of listening for liberation are at stake today. Institutionalized in Europe after WWII, ethnomusicology was shaped by East/West binaries, folk-music paradigms, and area-studies logics that structured archival practices, funding, mobility, and, crucially, what counted as legitimate subjects of research. These frames organized remembrance but also produced silences: forms of selective, institutionalized forgetting that have shaped ethnomusicologies as praxis.
Focusing on entanglements between former Yugoslavia and Austria, I trace the ongoing musical making and unmaking of memories of WWII liberation. This terrain becomes a lens for confronting the discipline’s past remembrance—for practising reparative listening, for (self-)reflexive unlearning of Cold War paradigms, and for attending to archival silences alongside counter-archival work. Against the backdrop of sonic revitalizations, contestations, and reinventions of liberation memories amid today’s overlapping crises of disaster capitalism, I ask what kinds of future-making practices ethnomusicology can offer—in conceptual, methodological, and practical terms.