Contesting Urban Political Auralities
Organizer(s): Brendan Kibbee (Rutgers Universtiy, New Brunswick)
Chair(s): Davindar Singh (Harvard University)
Through case studies on praise, protest, armed revolt, and indigenous (re)settlement, this panel examines how political actors use sound and music to articulate and contest space in urban environments. It foregrounds how interlocutors use listening and sounding practices as crucial political techniques to inhabiting and contesting urban space. Expanding on a crossdisciplinary focus on the politics of affect and sensory perception, these papers present diverse ethnographic case studies of political listening, making a unified case that listening in the context of urban space becomes crucial to political subjectivies and the negotiation of the stakes in which they are entrenched. The first panelist writes a history of Taiwanese settler urbanism focused on its liberal listening practices, which alternate between exclusion of Indigenous residents from civil society and inclusion on exclusively nonthreatening grounds of “culturally expressive” traditional performance. The second panelist examines the place of shared ethical listening practices (cf. Hirschkind 2006) in coalition-centered climate protest in Berlin, where activists’ attempts at densely sonically layered spacemaking are vulnerable to state and motorist intercession. The third panelist examines Sikh militant revolt on the Punjab-Haryana border, where periurban conflicts over land reclamation and corruption “spill over” into fights waged over, and through, uses of music and religious recitation in urban space. The final panelists examines the ways that political brokers in Dakar listen and respond to civil society movements in an urban environment saturated with praise-driven distributive politics. Together, these papers offer a vantage onto urban political contestation, and listening as a political technique.
Presentations in the Session
Remediating the Urban: Taipei Settler Multicultural Auralities
DJ Hatfield
National Taiwan University
In this paper, I work with archival materials, interviews, and ethnographic material from urban Indigenous communities in Taiwan to trace continuities and shifts in the ways that Indigenous musical practices have been configured by settler discourses of civility and multiculturalism. Indigenous communities formed in Taipei as construction and factory jobs beckoned Indigenous youth toward the city during the 1970s – 1980s. High rents and housing discrimination pushed these laborers to establish communities along the city’s margins, in riparian landscapes reminiscent of their home places in Hualien and Taitung. Settler depictions of life in these urban communities often focused on spaces of informal musical performance, hearing these spaces as signs of social breakdown and maladjustment. Although depictions of Indigenous sociality as a threat to urban civility continue to circulate in Taiwan today, multicultural discourses have reconfigured settler auralities; ironically, urban planners working with urban Indigenous communities in the 2000s heard spaces of Indigenous sociality as offering a salve for urban deracination and anomie. Spaces of indigenous sociality were thus not just necessary features of rebuilt urban Indigenous communities but could also reinvigorate Taipei’s settler population. Nonetheless, this shift in how some settler auralities configure subjects of remediation leaves core elements of a previous aurality intact. What listening practices and scalar projects afforded this uneven shift in aurality? Attention to the reconfiguration and continuity of settler aurality in terms of its subjects of remediation suggests that we rethink aurality beyond historical and ethnic binaries often employed to understand settler multiculturalism.
Guns, Grains, and Steals: Agrarian Urbanization, Trans-Border Spatial Claims, and Sikh Militant Aurality
Davindar Singh
Harvard University
After millions-strong farm protests roiled North India in 2020-2021, as discontent with India’s government suffused Punjab, Sikh militants attempted to channel farm protest momentum to Sikh militancy in pitched encampments dubbed “Qaumi Insaf Morcha” (“National Justice Strike”). This paper examines the political aurality of the largest encampment, straddling the Punjab-Haryana border, in light of the political-economic processes of agrarian urbanization fomenting revolt. Sikh militants link their specifically sonic practices of claiming space, including amplified prayer sessions and tractor joyrides with music accompaniment, to broader claims of territorial sovereignty. Moreover, militants depict everyday aural practices and musics in neighborhoods surrounding the border encampment as “enemy” spatial incursions which pollute sacred sites within the encampment, and within Punjab. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research, I outline how militants characterize their efforts to capture sonic space as avenging historical anti-Punjabi land displacement. I trace this displacement, and its Sikh militant contestation, to colonial-era and postcolonial Green Revolution policies increasing agrarian land capitalization. These policies furthered practices of forcible land possession, termed “kabza,” in variably illicit iterations that today suffuse conjoined rural-urban development. Militants both depict their sonic practices as retaliatory kabza and describe pop music performances near the encampment as kabza-like trespass, opposing popular music’s immoral urban values to those of agrarian Punjab and Sikhism. This case offers a particularly sonic vantage on the interpenetrated rural-urban topography that contemporary South Asianists term “agrarian urbanization,” long-characterized in Punjab by state and criminal land theft, now further characterized by religious sonic backlash.
On Account of Doomsday: Auralities of Climate Activism, Street Blockades, and the Multiple Lives of Civil Disobedience
Max Jack
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
As climate movements galvanize in response to the state and the EU’s role in perpetuating an accelerating climate crisis, I focus on the interrelated and ambivalent relationship between Extinction Rebellion and Letzte Generation (The Last Generation)—two activist networks active across Germany whose differing performative and rhetorical uses of civil disobedience aim to convey to politicians and a broader public an ecological crisis intertwined with crises of capitalism and liberal democracy. Based on long-term ethnographic research and participant observation, I explore activists’ expressions of affinity for a “damaged planet” (Tsing et al 2017)—that which manifests in the streets through the coalitions, ideological disjunctures, and tactical divergences over how best to save it. Regularly blockading busy streets and intersections, political speeches, drumming, and musical performances blast over mobile sound systems to create a dense, overlapping, and at times chaotic acoustic milieu, reorienting public space for entangled and overlapping practices of ethical listening (Hirschkind 2006) as well as a mutual commitment to witnessing the utopian desires, anxieties, and frustrations of participants (Taylor 2022). At the same time, activists are accosted by impeded drivers before being dragged away by riot police and in some cases placed in prison while their charges are processed by the court. If environmentalists in Germany aim to cultivate a political atmosphere that is somehow intimate, fraught and raw, the bodies and voices of activists work at the same time to hail the state, conjuring the precarity and bare life borne out by the climate crisis at large.
Auditory Alliances: Political Brokers and Civil Society in Dakar
Brendan Kibbee
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
This paper examines how political brokers in Dakar attune themselves to contradictory forces in the postcolonial urban soundscape. In the city’s popular quarters, praise poetry and drumming fuel a form of distributive politics in which brokers at many levels of the political hierarchy exercise significant control over access to resources and jobs. Beyond its status as a political tactic, praise also functions as a connective tissue in the city, binding modes of interdependence as people broadly distribute their affections toward one another in daily personal encounters. The personalistic aspect of praise and the piecemeal forms of distribution that it generates complicate efforts to build civil society movements based on universal rights. Yet, “civil society” endures as a prominent framing mechanism in the city’s musical life, and Senegal is often noted for the relative resilience of its democratic institutions.
Drawing on research between 2016 and 2023, I show how political brokers respond to echoes of civil and political society in the Dakar soundscape. Through a widely noted phenomenon known as “political transhumance,” many brokers are invested in preserving hierarchical forms of patronage politics, while also showing a readiness to reshuffle political alliances in response to moments of public dissatisfaction and protest. As music both registers public frustration and intensifies the value of praise and personal connections, I argue that it helps navigate key contradictions of the postcolonial city through its experiments with possibilities, limits, and combinations of these different forms of politics.
