Thursday February 27, 2025 – 5pm, Foster 103
Ronit Ghosh, PhD Candidate, Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Music, University of Chicago
Departing from existing approaches that study the modern Bengali song exclusively as a literary artifact and an extension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century song Bengali sung-lyric and (semi)-classical salon tradition, this talk listens closely to ways in which song-production transitions to radio and film studios from a live performance setting. Theorizing the concept of ‘song-as-sonotope’, it teases out how histories of Bengali song-making adjusted to and happened in conversation with the critical resources ushered in by the studio-economy, arguing that the studio-born Bengali song saw an unmatched transculturation of global musical idioms and sensibilities in Bengali popular music. Drawing on the interdisciplinarity of media and technology studies, this talk charts narratives of caste, gender, and labor as they are registered in Bengali song.