Portable Gray 15: Sounding the Spectral

Portable Gray 15: Sounding the Spectral (edited by Seth Brodsky and Martha Feldman). 

The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce the release of the fifteenth issue of Portable Gray, a publication that draws on the work of the Gray Center, a research center for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Co-edited by Seth Brodsky and Martha Feldman, Sounding the Spectral returns to the problem of ghosts—the phantom, the revenant, the haunting and the haunted. But these essays enter a new acoustic: more colonial, global, and planetary, taking stock of new spatial and temporal displacements, registering new forms of repression, secrecy, surveillance, and disavowal. Sound and music emerge as exceptionally amenable to this task. They sympathize with the spectral at its most manifold and elusive; reverberate with the spectral’s radical scalability; mediate its indifference to distance and barrier. Music, sound, spectrality: all strange mediums for the otherwise unbridgeable, for mapping otherwise inaccessible terrain. This issue also continues our reviews section, Portable Gray Review (PGR).

Editors' Plaisance 
Seth Brodsky and Martha Feldman

A Very Strange Vibration: “Never Can Say Goodbye” and its Afterlives  
Kameryn Alexa Carter

The Castrato as Subject, Dead or Alive 
Martha Feldman

Caribbean Jumbies and Soca's Kinetic Politics 
Jessica Swanston Baker

Unhearing Together, or, Spectra Against Surveillance 
Amy Cimini

(De)Crescendo 
J. Martin Daughtry and Jairo Moreno

Pirekua's Inheritance and the Afterimages of Song
Chris Batterman Chairez

Eli Greene

Handwringing (Nine Scenes)
Seth Brodsky

Ghosting Virginia
Bonnie Gordon

Castrato Fever: Impressions from a Séance with Veron Lee
Jess Peritz

Ornamentaility, or the Perfected Art of Empathy 
Fumi Okiji

Manifestations
Carolyn Abbate and Gary Tomlinson

Portable Gray Review (PGR)
Pothole³
Stephanie Cristello

A Match Made in Heaven: Katherine Bernhardt x Jeremy Scott 
Thomas Love

Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost
Pia Singh

Macie Stewart, When the Distance is Blue
Matthew Metzger

Rosa Barba: Poised Compression
Nicky Ni

The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 
Ellen Wiese

Upcoming issue: “Costume and The Life of Wearables” (edited by Leah Feldman)

*All issues of the journal are free online to students, staff, and faculty at any institution that subscribes to Portable Gray or the Complete Chicago Package from the University of Chicago Press. Search your library’s collection of online journals or ask your librarian if they subscribe to Portable Gray. You can also support the work of the Gray Center with your very own subscription today. Find out more here.

Executive Editor: Seth Brodsky / Editor-in-Chief: Zachary Cahill / Senior Editor: Mike Schuh / Managing Editor: Naomi Blumberg / Editor at Large: Stephanie Cristello / Contributing Editor: Sabrina Craig / Design: David Khan-Giordano / ISSN 2637-8361.

About the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Gray Center activities take place all over campus (encompassing various divisions, departments, and programs), across the community, throughout the city, and beyond. Through its various programs—including Gray Center Fellowships,  The Gray Co-Lab for Arts and Science, exploratory research initiatives, the monthly Sidebar conversation series, Gray Sound, an experimental music and sound performance series, international conferences, and institutional collaborations—the Gray Center seeks to foster a culture of innovation and experimentation at the intersection of arts practice and scholarship.

Press contact: Mike Schuh, mikes1@uchicago.edu