Audiotopia: Music, Race and America

Informed by Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" and by its Utopian values, Kun offers his readers various interdisciplinary, oppositional and interartistic case studies that he considers audiotopias, the spaces "within and produced by a musical element that offers the listener and/or musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world" (pp. 22-3). By reading Whitman's poem as a foundational text for nation building and for other, later texts inspired by it-particularly "America, I Hear you Singing," an album recorded by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Fred Waring in 1964-Kun is able to tease out the ways in which United States national identity was rhetorically identified as "the symphonic nation" (p. 41), as "a unified, ordered body of harmonic and orchestrated sound" (Ibid.).