Repositioning the Arts in Conflict Resolution and Shared Violent Pasts: Four Cases Studies in Peacebuilding, West Africa

Daniel Avorgbedor, SIT Study Abroad
Gavin Webb, SIT Study Abroad

Description

PANEL DESCRIPTION:

Drawing inspiration from a recent flurry of scholarly activities focusing on music in violence, war, peace and conflict resolution, we are proposing a panel in which contributors engage and extend specific theoretical and methodological dimensions of applied ethnomusicology and related disciplines / fields such as legal studies, political science, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, political psychology, critical ethnography, etc. Panel presenters share a common pool of field data pertaining to violence, conflict, war, disputations, fragmentation and displacement in contemporary African populations (Ghana and Nigeria), with practical and humanistic concerns and recommendations that would aid the peaceful coexistence and resettlement of groups in conflict. The panel’s emphasis on the performing arts, both as a symbolic form endowed with multiple sites of meaning and affect and as a medium for creating and revising social bonds complement, in significant ways, presenters’ specifications and recommendations for action-participatory research strategies. In this panel, presenters

(1) dialogue with “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) in identifying and relating data, analysis and conclusions to most recent thoughts in conflict resolution and in applied methodologies of diverse fields;

(2) demonstrate new understanding of space and memory in relation to violence and as summed up in Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,” History and Memory, 23.1(2011):5-22, or as in Shaw (2007), “Through their struggle against the Underworld, these Pentecostal youth reimagine Sierra Leone's war, reshaping experiences of violence that have shaped them and thereby transforming demonic memory into Pentecostal memory. Just as their own physical displacement is not an entirely negative condition, their displacement of violent memory is enabling rather than repressive.” (Rosalind Shaw, “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone,” Cultural Anthropology, 22.1(2007):66-93.


(3) revise “poetics of violence” in the contexts of the performing arts, as suggested in David A. McDonald, “Poetics and the Performance of Violence in Israel-Palestine,” Ethnomusicology, 53.1(2009):58-85;

(4) situate violence, conflict and prospects of peacebuilding in a larger discourse of identity and performance in religious and sociocultural circles, as exemplified in Jonathan Dueck, “Binding and Loosing in Song: Conflict, Identity, and Canadian Mennonite Music,” Ethnomusicology, 25.2, (2011): 229-254.

 
Jan 1st, 12:00 AM

Repositioning the Arts in Conflict Resolution and Shared Violent Pasts: Four Cases Studies in Peacebuilding, West Africa

PANEL DESCRIPTION:

Drawing inspiration from a recent flurry of scholarly activities focusing on music in violence, war, peace and conflict resolution, we are proposing a panel in which contributors engage and extend specific theoretical and methodological dimensions of applied ethnomusicology and related disciplines / fields such as legal studies, political science, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, political psychology, critical ethnography, etc. Panel presenters share a common pool of field data pertaining to violence, conflict, war, disputations, fragmentation and displacement in contemporary African populations (Ghana and Nigeria), with practical and humanistic concerns and recommendations that would aid the peaceful coexistence and resettlement of groups in conflict. The panel’s emphasis on the performing arts, both as a symbolic form endowed with multiple sites of meaning and affect and as a medium for creating and revising social bonds complement, in significant ways, presenters’ specifications and recommendations for action-participatory research strategies. In this panel, presenters

(1) dialogue with “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) in identifying and relating data, analysis and conclusions to most recent thoughts in conflict resolution and in applied methodologies of diverse fields;

(2) demonstrate new understanding of space and memory in relation to violence and as summed up in Katharina Schramm, “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,” History and Memory, 23.1(2011):5-22, or as in Shaw (2007), “Through their struggle against the Underworld, these Pentecostal youth reimagine Sierra Leone's war, reshaping experiences of violence that have shaped them and thereby transforming demonic memory into Pentecostal memory. Just as their own physical displacement is not an entirely negative condition, their displacement of violent memory is enabling rather than repressive.” (Rosalind Shaw, “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone,” Cultural Anthropology, 22.1(2007):66-93.


(3) revise “poetics of violence” in the contexts of the performing arts, as suggested in David A. McDonald, “Poetics and the Performance of Violence in Israel-Palestine,” Ethnomusicology, 53.1(2009):58-85;

(4) situate violence, conflict and prospects of peacebuilding in a larger discourse of identity and performance in religious and sociocultural circles, as exemplified in Jonathan Dueck, “Binding and Loosing in Song: Conflict, Identity, and Canadian Mennonite Music,” Ethnomusicology, 25.2, (2011): 229-254.