We are eagerly anticipating the release of the first title in our exciting new series Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge (Lancaster University, UK) and Sara Cohen (University of Liverpool, UK). Sacred and Secular Musics, by Virinder S. Kalra, publishes in November in the UK, and January in the US.
How does the sacred/secular opposition explain itself in the context of musical production? This volume traces this binary as it frames Western Classical music and Indian Classical music in the 18th and 19th centuries, laying the ground for a contemporary exploration of what is ostensibly sacred music in South Asia. Offering a potent critique of musicological knowledge-making, Virinder S. Kalra explores examples of South Asian musics in various domains and traverses a new cartography of music in which the sacred and the secular overlap.
Drawing on examples which include Qawwali, kirtan and popular devotional genres, Sacred and Secular Musics offers new empirical material, as well as new insights into conceptualising religion and music, and the ways in which music performs sacredness and secularity across the contested India-Pakistan border in the region of Punjab.
Peter Manual, Professor from the Music Department of the Graduate Center at City University, New York praises Kalra on the use of a 'remarkable abundance of original data on Sikh music, qawwali, and other genres in Pakistani and Indian Punjab' which results in 'astute interpretive perspectives on these understudied genres and regional dynamics'.
Look out for further forthcoming titles in the series including Christian Metal, by Marcus Moberg, and Religion in Hip Hop, edited by Monica R. Miller, Anthony B. Pinn and Bernard "Bun B" Freeman.
'Metal, a genre suffused with Christian imagery albeit with a blasphemous twist, spawned its own renegade, Christian metal. Metalhead religious scholar Marcus Moberg presents a detailed and analytically elegant definitive account of this counter-movement, a worthy addition to metal studies.' Deena Weinstein, Professor, Department of Sociology, DePaul University, USA
'An invaluable guide to a thriving yet frequently misunderstood subgenre, Moberg's authoritative, insightful work on Christian metal is essential reading for metal scholars.' Jeremy Wallach, Associate Professor, Bowling Green State University, USA
Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.
For more information on this series, and our other titles, please take a look at our website here.
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