Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political.Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

Foreword: Let It Get Into You Deborah KapchanAcknowledgements Introduction: On Intimate Entanglements Sidra Lawrence1. Yusef's Breath: Jazz Love, Cross-Racial Identification, and Paying Dues Tracy McMullen2. Three Reflections, with Epilogue Steven Cornelius3. Modulating Flawed Bodies: Intimate Acoustemologies, Chronic Pain, and Ethnographic Pianism Mark Lomanno4. Performing Desire: Race, Sex, and the Ethnographic Encounter Sidra Lawrence5. Thick Descriptions Catherine M. Appert6. Entering the Lives of Others: Entangled Intimacies, Trauma, and Performance Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum7. Ethnomusicological Empathy: Excavating a Black Graduate Student's Heartland Danielle Davis8. Ethnomusicological Becoming: Deep Listening as Erotics in the Field Carol Muller9. Mirror Dancing in Congo: Reflections on Fieldwork as Blanche Neige Lesley N. Braun10. Ethnography and Its Double(s): Theorizing the Personal with Jews in Ghana Michelle KisliukNotes on Contributors Index