2026 Mergen-Palmer Distinguished Lecture, Part II // Prof. Ronald Radano

Prof. Ronald Radano's lecture, entitled "On Enlivened Possessions: Uncovering the Racial Economy of Black Music’s Animated Presence," explores how the concept of aliveness—of a living presence inhabiting Black sound—emerged as the defining principle of Black musical value. It illustrates how the music’s seemingly enlivened character—variously identified as spirit, soul, groove, etc.—developed not simply from the act of performance but from Black music’s unique participation in capitalist market economies. Conceived during the slave era as an audible materialization of the laboring Black body, Black music took form as a structural refusal of White laws of ownership: in its embodied attachments to the enslaved worker, Black music arose as an animated property always partly under Black control, despite laws prohibiting slaves from possessing valuable things. White efforts to capture and reclaim this illicit possession heightened its value, all the more so once Black music began to circulate in commercial markets. In its modern iterations, Black music coalesces as something peculiarly double in form: an exchangeable commodity that simultaneously retains the inalienable presence of Black being. This double structure drives Black music’s distinctive counterhistorical motion, constantly shifting from commercial markets back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contests of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music.
Ronald Radano is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the history of US Black music and its transnational circulation. He studies music through the interpretive mechanisms of cultural theory and history, giving particular emphasis to the ideological formation of race. Radano is the author and coeditor of five books, including two award-winning monographs, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago, 1993) and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003), together with the edited collections, Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000) and Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke, 2016). His third monograph, Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory, was published by Duke University Press in fall 2025.

Radano is the founding coeditor of the book series, Refiguring American Music (Duke) and served as coeditor of Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology for twelve years. He has been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the Smithsonian Institution, the Du Bois Institute, and Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, where he was a senior research fellow from 2013 to 2017. In 2019, Radano was a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where he began work on his current project, which examines African sound recording produced during the period of imperial Germany’s colonial occupation before World War I.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher American Studies Department // GW