[Commlist] CFP AAG 2025 Detroit - Thinking through Detroit techno: a panel discussion

CFP AAG 2025 Detroit
Thinking through Detroit techno: a panel discussion
In the spirit of feeling scholarly and activist responsibility towards 
the city wherein the AAG descends, this panel session invites anyone 
with knowledge of the electronic music genre of techno to reflect on its 
geographies and sonic qualities. In the United States electronic music 
has never been quite as intellectually recognized as in other parts of 
the world. Maybe that has something to do with its anchoredness in black 
and queer underground scenes. Furthermore, more than in any other dance 
genre, the signifier “Detroit techno” has stood for a fidelity to 
abstraction, timelessness, and collectivity. Can this uniquely modernist 
aesthetic be explained at all by the uniquely catastrophic conditions of 
its urban emergence? How did millions become so dedicated to this gritty 
sound in Berlin, London, Ibiza, Brussels, Tokyo, Melbourne, Buenos 
Aires, Belgrade? What did techno’s commodification and whitening through 
globalization mean for its futural imaginations? Or even, quite simply, 
what do you love about Detroit techno?
Please send an email with a few lines of what you would like to talk 
about and any questions to (saldanha /at/ umn.edu) by October 28, 2024.
Some approaches:
- Afrofuturism
- the black radical tradition
- blues epistemologies
- urban history
- feminist and queer interpretations of dance music
- musical/sonic analysis, production techniques
- political economy of rave and club scenes
- personal stories of producing or deejaying
- phenomenology of dancing
- drugs culture
- differentiations from Motown, funk, dub, hiphop, electro, house
- interactions with hardcore, trance, psytrance, hyperpop, classical
- spinoff microgenres elsewhere in the world
- use of techno in film, video games, advertising
Some sources:
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction 
(London, Quartet Books, 1998)
The Last Angel of History, documentary directed by John Akomfrah (UK, 1996)
Michaelangelo Matos, The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance 
Music Conquered America (New York, HarperCollins, 2015)
Katherine McKittrick, “The smallest cell remembers a sound”, in Dear 
Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2021)
Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance 
Culture (London, Faber & Faber, 1997, new editions 2008 and 2013)
Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (Detroit, 
Wayne State University Press, 1999, new edition 2010)
McKenzie Wark, Raving (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023)
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