Reverberations of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer, poet, activist, and independent scholar whose experimental triptych (Spill, M Archive, Dub) offers both mundane and unearthly interventions for humanity’s struggles against histories of ecological extraction and Black feminist refusals. Sangodare is a multimedia artist, musician, and theologian drawing from Black feminist writings and African Diaspora wisdom. They are co-founders of several multi-platform undertakings such as the Mobile Homecoming Project that birthed the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus (BFBC). It is one of many online and in-person spaces supporting QPOC and Black feminist communities. The BFBC, in particular, blends theory, meditation, music, poetics, and Black church traditions. In this asynchronous mantra practice, hundreds of participants receive daily “ancestor” mantras via the Mobilehomecoming.org website. These mantras are shortened quotes from the diverse writings and speeches of figures such as Marsha P. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. The social, juridical, and digital records of violence against women, POC, queer, and non-binary bodies and communities is not new. However, as consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have overlapped with conspicuous displays of anti-Black policing and asymmetric economies, the BFBC has provided an alternative space to rebuild and re-enchant social, political, and intellectual life through a remixed spiritual practice of amplifying voices. This interview highlights how race, gender, location, and time do not limit the quest for freedom. Thus, the primacy of Black queer positionality is instrumental in the chorus’s examination of both liberating and oppressive social hierarchies.

Listening for the Pictures

This essay is inspired by the words of Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Sun Times photographer John White, who once told me to “listen for the pictures.” His message rang clear but never more so than when in 1990 we were covering the release of Nelson Mandela in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town scene was alive and filled with so much vibrance. I was keenly aware that I must not just look, but I must listen, and use all my God-given senses to take it in. I can only describe the moment I started listening to the layer of sound, which was my own clicking camera superimposed on the chorus of sounds that surrounded me as both meta and sonorific. There was a certain rhythm to the sensation I felt in being one with my camera. It transported me to a wonderful place in time where visuals and cadences danced together. I realized there was alchemy in this and in all the other moments and locations I had spent behind a camera developing and exercising that “inner ear” my ancestors, some gone, like Gordon Parks, but others here, like White, taught me to revere. This essay is a snapshot of some of those moments—a proof sheet, if you will—from a life that began, as did the civil rights era, with instances of terror and triumph. This essay chronicles my journey as a young photographer and the many influences that shaped my creative process and eventually my worldview. This essay is an invitation to travel with me through time and see life as my camera and I witnessed it, and to hear and sense the world as I do.

Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in the Anthropocene

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

Cross-fading the City

Widely discussed among scholars of cities in Africa is the need to conceive these cities as relational formations, but rarely is the sensory addressed. Scholarship on urban soundscapes has tended to emphasize aesthetic and technological practices without grappling with their aural political import. This article brings together these conversations in order to address the intersections of urban sound and politics in a small Ugandan city. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Gulu, the author examines how young Acoli men use aural, expressive social practices to sonically rework the city and their place in it. Referencing the work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and critical theorists concerned with sound, the author argues that practices of “expressive sociability” elaborate a relational politics of city-making vis-à-vis their intimate exchanges that cross-fade with urban street soundscapes. This work aims to amplify the importance of ordinary aural practices to conceiving political valences of relational life in global south cities.

Start Here

This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic soundscape from its introduction in the early 1960s until its gradual obsolescence in the first decades of the 21st century. The piece aims to provide a new perspective on the cassette by way of a discussion of the Start Here tapes project: a series of seven artist audio cassette tapes released in 2016 and 2017. Applying a practice-based methodology to a study of objects that are intimate and well known, the project seeks to foreground the material agency of the cassette by making work that reflexively references material objecthood. The article examines what is at stake politically in this focus on materiality, and considers the way creative forms of reflexivity might have renewed ethical and political value within a ecopolitical or biopolitical context.

Invisible, as Music / But Positive, as Sound

This essay reflects upon how teaching with podcasts—as well as students’ creation of audio self-portraits, audio character portraits, and digital presentations of Indigenous playwrights’ work—directed both students and professor to consider identity and positionality in new ways. Riffing on rhetorics of the ocular vs the aural in discussions of identity, performance, and embodiment, here transcultural and transdisciplinary connections emerge to consider listening as a technology for relationality.

Remembering the Dead and Say Their Names

This essay considers the role of sound, as in spoken voice, in two multimedia memorials to individuals killed by violence in the United States. The first is Remembering the Dead, a memorial to victims of mass shootings from the 1880s to the present. The second is Say Their Names, a memorial to victims of police violence and brutality. The use of sound (the speaking aloud of victims' names) in both these installations is meant to create and extend a space, a temporary autonomous zone that offers—through thoughtful listening to the names of victims spoken aloud—perceptual, phenomenological, and sensory engagements with the act of remembrance to provide witness and memorial for those killed and to promote meaningful social and civic justice to stop the killings. In this regard, both projects were conceived and developed as media activism.

Heraclitus and Sonic Thinking

“The material Flux”; “the hidden mobility beneath”; “Sonic Logos.” Any classicist familiar with the fragments of Heraclitus would be surprised to find these concepts developed in today’s theories about sonic art from authors from different traditions such as Salomé Voegelin, Julian Henriques, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Christoph Cox. The present paper intends to open a dialogue between these authors and Heraclitus, claiming that there is an underlying connection beyond mere coincidence. Sonic thinking proposes listening as the way to access or produce a particular knowledge—one that would otherwise be too difficult or impossible to grasp. This knowledge is produced by practices such as listening and musical meditation instead of intellectual activity alone. To make the case, the authors will present a general outline of what sonic thinking entails to compare it with the relevant points in Heraclitus’s philosophy. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to provide a new sonic framework to read Heraclitus and to provide an old framework to read sonic thinking.

Soundscapes of Productivity

Using the urban portmanteau terms “coffice” and “coffitivity” as a starting point, this paper examines ideas around sound and productivity with a focus on coffee shop ambiences. The project considers café soundscapes “soundscapes of productivity” reflective of changing attention spans, work process, and stress management that invoke cultural histories of Muzak, personalized sonic spaces, and the sonic management of everyday life. A result of over six years of ethnographic observations, recordings, and decibel measurements, Soundscapes of Productivity has also been compiled into a Story Map as a kind of soundwork collage of different coffee shop ambiences in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is used here for its local specificity, including a rapidly gentrifying urban infrastructure and a creative freelance haven with aspirations to be the Canadian Silicon Valley. The project presents an opportunity to link scientific discourses of the stimulus response model of sonic productivity historically and politically with the modern practice of productivity playlists, and bridge them together with acoustic environments seemingly replicating former factory production—environments such as the urban coffee shop.