Music Research Forum-Dr Luis-Manuel Garcia

Title: Together, Somehow: Rethinking Dancefloor Intimacies in Our Pandemic Decade

Abstract: 

Who can you count on, when you go out dancing? What binds you to the strangers that surround you on the dancefloor? To what do you belong, and how can you know for sure? The forthcoming book, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Duke UP), addresses questions such as these through an ethnographic study of urban electronic dance music scenes on the cusp of the 2010s, but what has changed since then? This lecture will revisit some of the key insights from Together, Somehow and reconcile them with recent transformations in underground club scenes—especially in response to the current pandemic, the intensification of right-wing violence, and the vernacularization of feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism.