In Sigmund Freud’s famous 1930 text, Civilization and Its Discontents, the question of aggression and sublimated energies which haunt the edges of “civilization” and its procedures has both influenced and been challenged by postcolonial thought. From Franz Fanon’s theories of the colonial and colonized subject in the face of violence in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to Ranjanna Khan’s Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) which situates the emergence of the psychoanalytic subject within the historical events of colonialism, these writers’ work among others index larger questions on the ontological status of the human both obscured by and revealed through disciplinary apparatuses of knowledge production. Informed by the historical structures of empire, colonial occupation, and chattel slavery that resound ever loudly in the present, our panel takes this injunction to task by asking another question, how can we “hear” empire and its discontents? If, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, “Empire” is not only concerned with blood, possession, and domination, but reproduces its banalities through a world-making project with sensorial investments for pleasure and even peace, then we must ask how such soundings and noises are more than derivative or constitutive to such “scenes.” This understanding may perhaps even imply a scoring, or composition. Further, in each of our papers, we push to ask if sounding its discontentedness or the sounds of discontent have resistant potentialities?
This session presents work by early career scholars in the fields of sound, music, and noise studies, spanning regional interests, methods, mediums, and languages of cultural production. Our panel is made up of scholars training in the interdisciplinary programs of American Studies, Performance Studies, and History of Consciousness, and we believe our varied locations and interests, from performance, film theory, ethnography, or critical social theory will create a lively discussion in our focused attendance to sound and empire. Our papers are situated in conversation with aural investigations on the (re)calibrations of the human, humanness, or humanity in histories of empire and colonialism. Scholars like Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier and Diana Taylor, employing ethnographic and performance methods, challenge the legibilities of “voice” to configure how aurality and alterity were managed and defined by violent colonial occupations. We are also inspired by the sonic interventions and poetics of scholars such as Kara Keeling, Daphne Brooks, Fred Moten, Marie Thompson, Edouard Glissant, Kendra Salois, Michael Denning, Nina Eidsheim, Hisham Aidi, Josh Kun, Michel Chion, and Roshanak Kheshti. We will be joined by the panel’s respondent, Dr. Kheshti, who will pose questions for our papers and the audience to begin an engaging discussion.
Three panelists will present their papers with a strict 15-minute limit to ensure longer discussion among panelists and and audience. We will begin the session with “‘Can You Hear Me?’: Asian/American Interventionist Performance and the Matter of Loudness” by Peggy Lee. She examines the dilemma of sonically relating or failing to register through the contemporary guerilla performances of two queer Asian/American artists, Tina Takemoto and Vivian Bang. Both artists politically “intervene” in public space with noise to disturb, for Takemoto, art world Orientalism, and for Bang, the conceit of racial liberalism in US-Pacific empire building by amplifying her stream of consciousness on the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. By employing drag performances of Asian femininity, respectively playing with Asiatic Japanese femininity and android femininity, loudness becomes a condition of both protest and misfire. By approaching loudness as affect, Peggy argues their performances of noisy Asian femininity are queer temporal strategies devised against the “indifference” of empire.
Turning to “blurring” of narrative and sound through film aesthetics, Trung Nguyen’s talk “79 Primaveras: Cuban Aesthetics of Vietnamese Historical Performances” examines Cuban propagandist Santiago Álvarez’s short documentary that paid tribute and functioned as eulogy to the late Hồ Chí Minh. Trung studies how Álvarez, in this film, syncopates what J. Martin Daughtry refers to as belliphonic sound (sounds that hail a listening subject as a matter of life or death in a time of war – vehicles, planes, ballistic weaponry) to Vietnamese-Cuban postcolonial political imaginaries, scoring the future through revolutionary violence. He argues that Álvarez’s sensory practice inverts the terms of Michel Chion’s isophonic narrative blurring (where one sound results in multiple signifieds rather than two sounds arriving at the same signified) as a tactic of refusing the post-Enlightenment category of rational human subjectivity.
The paper presentations conclude with a turn to ethnography and sound in Tarek Benchouia’s talk titled “The Young Targets: Collaboration against Empire from Chicago to Cairo.” He investigates an American Embassy funded 2018 collaboration between Teklife and 100Copies, a Chicago footwork collective and Egyptian record label, respectively. Through interviews, careful listenings, and close readings, Benchouia interrogates the political-economic, here, read and heard as imperial underside of transnational performance collaboration, yet highlights the decolonial potentialities emergent in the sonic and embodied intermingling of these popular music cultures.
Our panel intervenes in the the bifurcations of primitivity/modernity, internal life/external world, or geospatial imaginaries, i.e., Orient/Occident or the Transatlantic, through the complex orientations and subjectifications of aurality/alterity or what can be heard, or conversely, what cannot be heard (or, “drowned out”). In other words, if sound and musical cultures as scholars across disciplines have noted, have the potential of disrupting such perceptual binaries, than we move backwards and sideways to the question of the agential subject imbricated by the crossings of histories addressed in this panel. Moving away from correlations such as agency and “voice,” and therefore complicating the discourse of what Stuart Hall critiqued as the “West and the Rest,” our panel investigates sonic materiality on its own terms, going beyond the legible ease of the Westernized, liberal autonomous subject; in so doing, discontent becomes reconfigured through conceptual and material explorations of music, noise, blur, and loudness.