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Peripheral Futures  ‘Yet the music had promised us’: Musical Biopolitics in Rebecca West’s Apocalyptic Imaginaries

  • Wednesday, 15 July 2026, 18:00 - 20:00
  • Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Seminargebäude, CATS Auditorium (R. 010.01.05), Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg
    • Dr. Tsung-Han Tsai, Heidelberg University, Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies

Music is often thought of as universal, as an abstract art form detached from politics; musical sounds are perceived as non-referential but powerfully evocative, their expressivity reaching beyond the rationality of language. Yet, since the 1980s, musicology has gradually shifted from this perception of music to emphasizing music’s intersection with politics, resulting in the increasing attention to music as situated within and formative to a political milieu of regulatory mechanisms. In his talk, Tsung-Han Tsai will present his work on the biopolitical significance of music in apocalyptic narratives in Europe in the 1930s, and particularly in the writings of Rebecca West.

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    Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies
    Seminargebäude
    CATS Auditorium (R. 010.01.05)
    Voßstraße 2
    69115 Heidelberg

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All Dates of the Event 'Peripheral Futures – Reading History from the “Margins”'

Where is future created? Based on some of the research done in the Thematic Research Network “Denk(t)räume–(Re)thinking and Building Futures” and at CAPAS, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, this event series takes the question of building futures from the margins as its starting point for a review of some of the seminal literature in global history. The aim is to foreground marginalized sources (material peripheries, e.g., the “un-disciplined" knowledge produced by the arts), positions (socio-political pheripheries, e.g., that of indigenous protesters), and regions of the world (spatial peripheries, e.g., parts of the world that do not make headline news) as well as specific times (chronological pheripheries: questioning why there may be a privileging of specific periods in time while neglecting others). 

In taking what is read as “marginal”, its voices and sources seriously, and by including artistic and activist resources, this series offers an intervention to established academic reasoning: at a time when apocalyptic narratives and authoritarian visions of the future dominate public discourse, the events focus on different forms of “critical hope” that can emerge in times of crisis: analytically grounded, socially engaged, and convinced that a diverse, collectively shaped future arises from the productive tension between different worldviews, the event series sets out to test out transcultural perspectives on and alternative approaches to the writing of histories (of and for the future).

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