2012-2013 IDAH Faculty Fellow
Daniel Reed
Associate Professor
IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Project: "Dancing (Together) Around Discourses: Providing Online Access to Annotated Multimedia Materials on Ivorian Immigrant Performance"
Professor Reed received a Collaborative Research and Creative Activity Funding (CRCAF) grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research to collaborate with IDAH on a project that associates multimedia with his forthcoming book. As an IDAH fellow through his CRCAF grant, Daniel will work with us during the 2012-2013 academic year, and participate in IDAH activities.
His project, "Dancing (Together) Around Discourses: Providing Online Access to Annotated Multimedia Materials on Ivorian Immigrant Performance" will examine adaptations of performative form and meaning in the lives of musicians, dancers and mask performers from Côte d’Ivoire living in the United States. Through life histories and performance analysis, this study argues that performative adaptations cannot be understood in binary terms such as homeland/new land, but rather as fluid social and cultural processes intertwined with shifting circumstances in immigrant performers’ lives. Immigrant performers occupy multiple spaces simultaneously; as members of an immigrant community geographically dispersed across the eastern US, they are simultaneously unmoored from their place of origin and deeply engaged in its symbolic representation to North American audiences. These artists operate strategically in and around discourses of Africa as an authentic, racialized, sacred space, at turns reifying and challenging such discourse.
During this project Daniel will partner with IDAH and the Ethnomusicology Multimedia (EM) publication series to annotate his book’s companion multimedia materials for online access on the new (EM) series website built by IDAH. He will prepare his materials using the Annotation Management System (AMS), an online software application designed specifically for the EM series by IDAH to upload, segment, and annotate digitized audio, video, and photographic files and link them directly to specific passages in a book