In this episode of High Theory, Brian Fairley tells us about Polyphony, a concept from music that describes multiple melodic lines sounding at once. The many voices of polyphony have an ancient and colonial history, which has reappeared in some key reverberations in twentieth century criticism and theory. 

In the conversation, we discuss several texts, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929); James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (UC Press, 1986); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993); and one of Kim’s favorite scholarly books, Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton, 2021). Brian also discusses Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work “On Difference Without Separability.” 

Brian Fairley received his PhD in Ethnomusicology from New York University in 2023; he is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at Amherst College.His manuscript in progress, Dissected Listening: Race, Nation, and Polyphony in the South Caucasus, excavates a series of experimental sound recordings from 1916 to 1966 to show how the concept of musical polyphony emerged in tandem with techniques of multichannel sound and imperial discourses of racial, national, and religious difference. His work has appeared in the journal Ethnomusicology and is forthcoming in Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory, as well as an edited volume titled Key Terms in Music Theory for Antiracist Scholars. 

The image for this episode is Paul Klee’s 1932 painting “Polyphony,” which is in the public domain in the US and Europe, but maybe not in Mexico. Digital image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Warning: this episode of High Theory is very silly.

In our new summer series of “Sillies,” Saronik and Kim ask each other how simple things will achieve the grandiose task of saving the world. In this episode, Kim asks Saronik about how horses will save the world. 

The texts we mention (or meant to mention) in the episode are (in some vague order):

Peter Shaffer, Equus, 1973

Girish Karnad, Hayavadana, 1971

Sharon Patricia Holland, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (Duke UP, 2023)

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago UP, 2022)

Raymond Malewitz, “On the Origin of ‘Oops!’: The Language and Literature of Animal Disease” Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019). 

In this episode we used sound effects from freesound.org.  To make the episode we downloaded sounds created by the following users: BUNCHA SOUNDS BOI!; InspectorJ; felix.blume. Click the link to hear the sound.

This episode’s silly image was created by Saronik Bosu. It is a distortion of “Whistlejacket” (1762) by George Stubbs

In this episode of High Theory, Debashree Mukherjee talks about the pioneering film studio Bombay Talkies, founded in 1934 in the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) by Himansu Rai and Devika Rani. Its cast and crew of diverse global origins and training, offer new ways of writing the history of labor in Indian Cinema. In the accompanying B-Side, she focuses on her new book Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, which features rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of cinematographer Josef Wirsching. Wirsching brought the influence of German Expressionism to Indian cinema, and was responsible for the cinematic stylings of groundbreaking films like Achhyut Kanya (1936), Mahal (1949), and Pakeezah (1972).

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Her second book project, Camera Obscura: Media at the Dawn of Planetary Extraction, develops a media history of  oceanic migrations and plantation capitalism. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and in a previous life she worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson.

Image: Sourced from Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema with permission.

In this episode of High Theory, Eram Alam talks with us about shortage. A political tool, rather than a natural lack, the concept of a shortage changes the flows of goods and people across borders and space. The concept of a doctor shortage was used in the US immigration reform of the 1960s to recruit discount elite labor from newly postcolonial nations, creating the downstream effect of shortages in their countries of origin. These recruiting practices remain in effect, with a US physician workforce that is approximately 25% international medical graduates, while domestic and international doctor shortages abound. 

Eram Alam is an assistant professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her book The Care of Foreigners studies the enduring consequences of post-colonial migration from Asia to the US.  We’re so excited to read it when it comes out! In the meantime, you can read her article “Cold War Crises: Foreign Medical Graduates Respond to US Doctor Shortages, 1965–1975” Social History of Medicine 33 no. 1 (Feb 2020). 

This week’s image of a hospital corridor was uploaded to the image sharing site Pixbay by a user named Mitrey.