Conference Agenda

Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was described as a “disabled city” (Sielman, 2007; Rivin 2015). What does such a designation mean for the soundscape of a city whose identity and economy are so closely tied to music? This has been the challenge of representation confronting filmmakers who have taken up the catastrophe: should they invoke the city’s rich musical heritage or allow the devastation to determine the soundtrack? The 2025 release of Ryan Coogler’s realist historical documentary Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time invites a reassessment of how serialized audiovisual accounts of Katrina and its aftermath frame the relationship between music, disaster, trauma, and the city’s racialized communities (Sonnenberg 2025), with particular attention to HBO’s fictional Treme (2010–2013) by David Simon and Eric Overmyer.

Drawing upon the literature of racialized “dark” tourism (Smalley 2022), disaster-based trauma theory (Herman 1982; Keim 2020), and Marek Susdorf’s concept of “music-washing” (2025), this paper explores musical mediation through two audiovisual recountings of Katrina. The five episodes of Race Against Time present the disabled city through a stark observational narrative of personal loss and systemic failure (Harrison 2025), stressing the devastation of the Crescent City’s Black communities (Sonnenberg 2025) and accompanied by unobstrusive atmospheric scoring (Amanda Jones). In contrast, the three seasons of Treme stage New Orleans as a city rebuilding and overcoming trauma through culture, musical heritage, and performance which are centrally positioned as agents of rebirth (Hudelet 2017; Morris and Kadetz 2018) in a tourist-friendly accounting (Thomas 2012).

However, taped oral histories of Katrina survivors (from the University of New Orleans Katrina Response Archive, Tulane’s Amistad Research Center, and LSU Libraries Special Collections) provide no real evidence for how music assisted survivors’ documented PTSD recovery (DeSalvo et al. 2007; McLaughlin et al. 2011). Instead, one could read Treme as engaging in what Susdorf terms “sonic overrepresentation” or “music-washing” (2025, 241), by which the grim realities of racialized trauma and structural abandonment are softened through an acoustically saturated representation of the city (Letort 2013; Pattison 2013). Thus political and social inequities are made to yield to the aural exigencies of neoliberal commercial media.

This paper examines Vodou vocality and vibration as embodied technologies of resistance and worldmaking within Haitian Vodou. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners, ritual specialists, and sound archives, it foregrounds the voice, breath, rhythm, and percussive utterance as epistemic forces that exceed language and textuality. In Vodou ceremonial contexts, vocal sounds, chants, cries, seemingly unintelligible utterances, call-and-answer patterns, and breath-inflected exhalations operate not merely as expressive media but as vibrational acts that reorganize space, time, and relationality. These sonic practices call lwa yo (Vodou spirits), activate ancestral memory, and recalibrate the body toward balance, producing what practitioners describe as alignment rather than belief.

By centering the animation of vocality in Vodou, this paper examines how vocal performances function within the liturgical cycle, their role in sustaining cultural memory, and their capacity to mobilize both spiritual power and social solidarity. It examines instances of divine interaction as conveyed through vocal sonorities and the responses elicited from listeners. It highlights the expertise of Vodou priests, who provide insight into the significance of voice and the interpretations of performances of Vodou liturgical songs. Situating Vodou vocality within Black Atlantic histories of enslavement, colonial violence, and epistemic suppression, the paper argues that vibration functions as a counter-archive: a mode of transmission that resists capture by colonial grammars and survives through repetition, resonance, and corporeal attunement. These vocal practices transcend expression; they function as vibrational strategies that regulate energy, mediate the presence of spirits, and promote collective equilibrium in situations marked by social precarity. Vocal vibration becomes a practice of fugitivity, enabling practitioners to sustain worlds that colonial modernity sought to silence or eradicate. Through sustained attention to timbre, iteration, and resonance, the paper theorizes Vodou sound as a material force that shapes social life and African cosmology alike.

This paper examines Yvette Janine Jackson’s 2017 narrative electronic soundscape composition Destination Freedom as not only a science fictional critique of anti-Blackness, but of the planetary conditions the history of anti-Blackness helped to induce. Destination Freedom is about an Atlantic slave ship that transforms into a spaceship voyaging towards a new, unspecified planetary home. It opens in the hold of a ship making the Middle Passage where sounds evoking creaking timbers, clanking shackles, lapping waves, strained breathing, and tense heartbeats produce an acoustic architecture of capture. Gradually, these sounds morph into the crackle and thrum of rocket engines. The closing minutes render the weightlessness of outer space, narrating an open-ended journey away from the constitutive anti-Blackness of modernity on Earth.

I ask what it means to situate Destination Freedom not only within American or world history, but within planetary, geological, climatic history. Jackson’s counterfactual sonic narrative—thwarting the Middle Passage in favor of interplanetary flight—ponders an ecological hypothesis articulated by philosopher Déborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: without the pillage of the Americas and rise of plantation capitalism, there may have been no Industrial Revolution and thus perhaps no climate breakdown. Destination Freedom prompts scrutiny towards how the extractive anti-Blackness of colonization and its plantation enslavement economies structured environmentally destructive modern capitalism and the Anthropocene climate crisis. And rather than centering themes of ecological entanglement or pastoral relationality like much ecocritical artmaking, by thematizing flight from the world, Jackson’s work parallels Afropessimist theory’s figure of the end of the world—the complete dismantling of modernity’s paradigms—narrating the total refusal of world systems predicated on the domination of nature and racialized people.

Black speculative sound practices sidestep the orthodoxies of the environmental humanities, proposing that routes to livable ecological futures require us to radically abjure systems of extraction, accumulation, and environmental plunder—including ones predating the Industrial Revolution and the rise of fossil fuels. By thematizing interplanetary travel, Destination Freedom gestures toward a different possible Earth: one not predicated upon the catastrophes of racial slavery, colonial empire, and the domination of nature, but upon futures still underway.