Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance, in ethnography, and in institutional and disciplinary settings.

Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.

Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political.

Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

Foreword: Let It Get Into You
Deborah Kapchan
Acknowledgements

Introduction: On Intimate Entanglements
Sidra Lawrence

1. Yusef's Breath: Jazz Love, Cross-Racial Identification, and Paying Dues
Tracy McMullen
2. Three Reflections, with Epilogue
Steven Cornelius
3. Modulating Flawed Bodies: Intimate Acoustemologies, Chronic Pain, and Ethnographic Pianism
Mark Lomanno
4. Performing Desire: Race, Sex, and the Ethnographic Encounter
Sidra Lawrence
5. Thick Descriptions
Catherine M. Appert
6. Entering the Lives of Others: Entangled Intimacies, Trauma, and Performance
Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum
7. Ethnomusicological Empathy: Excavating a Black Graduate Student's Heartland
Danielle Davis
8. Ethnomusicological Becoming: Deep Listening as Erotics in the Field
Carol Muller
9. Mirror Dancing in Congo: Reflections on Fieldwork as Blanche Neige
Lesley N. Braun
10. Ethnography and Its Double(s): Theorizing the Personal with Jews in Ghana
Michelle Kisliuk

Notes on Contributors
Index