Venue: Theatre 2
Time: 4pm-5.30pm
Presenter(s): Dr Felix Morgenstern
Chair: Dr Aileen Dillane
Drawing upon a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, this presentation problematises noticeable white nationalist undercurrents to the practices and discourses, past and present, of Irish traditional music in Germany. While shedding light on key historical factors, such as the racist polemic of German Celtic scholars operational during the Nazi era, the main focus will be on a critique of intersectional paywalls of belonging in relation to the contemporary German Irish traditional music community, which still privilege white, male, middle-class performers. In the current moment, such critical inquiry reminds us of music's remarkable capacity to sound contemporary strains of extreme nationalism, while hiding its disguised racist (and hegemonic masculine) underbelly behind a seemingly benign fa莽ade.
Dr Felix Morgenstern is an ethnomusicologist and Irish traditional music practitioner from Berlin, an Austrian Science Fund recipient, and an IRC Fellow.