Musical feelings and affective politics

Over the past two decades, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have homed in on affect as a crucial dimension of political life. This special issue argues that music – as sound and as practice – has an important role to play in this evolving academic conversation. While music can and does carry symbolic meanings, people are commonly drawn to music because of how it makes them feel. Moreover, these feelings have exceptional potency, enabling the emergence of new subjectivities, social collectives and political imaginaries. Building on recent developments and critiques of affect theory from within the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies and ethnomusicology, this special issue seeks to push the conversation forward by better accounting for the musical life of affect. We begin this introduction with a brief overview of the relevant literature on affect in order to situate our own interventions, both conceptually and disciplinarily. We then explore the work that music does in responding to critiques of affect theory. Here, we propose the idea of ‘musical feelings’ as an inclusive conceptual framework for discussing the sensations and stories that endow music with social efficacy, thereby overcoming some of the theoretical impasses which, we suggest, may be discouraging broader engagement with affect among music scholars. Following this, we draw attention to the varied political projects that musically-mediated affects both augur and facilitate. In the final section, we examine the methodological challenges posed by the study of musical feelings, highlighting the affordances of ethnography and the necessity of multi-sited, multi-scalar dynamic research in accounting for musical feelings’ social efficacy.