Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Chile, this paper examines how sound mediates necropolitical relations among hinchas (soccer fans). These men belong to the communities most viscerally affected by the neoliberal deterioration of working-class life in the country. Through carnival sounds and contrafacta of popular music, hinchas not only cheer for their teams but also construct hyper-masculine imaginaries and make audible their precarious social conditions. However, their hostile vocalizations, aggressive movements, and necrotic songs—filled with death threats, stories of combat, and discriminatory slurs—also radicalize subjectivities and hostilities within and between fanbases, making death the defining marker of a necropolitical reality.

This presentation argues that fan violence has given rise to a necropolitical acoustemology. A source and expression of necropower (Mbembe 2019), hinchas deploy sound not only to represent material violence but also to enact it. Sound operates as a means of disrupting neoliberal inequalities while simultaneously reinforcing internal hierarchies and exerting social control. Mediating the political and social relations of fanbases, sound enables hinchas to navigate deadly conflicts in which force serves as the primary mode of resolution. Engaging theories on the productive nature of violence (Benjamin 2021; Clastres 1994; Fanon 2004) and ethnomusicological perspectives on musical performance as both violent and culturally generative (Daughtry 2015; McDonald 2013; Meintjes 2017; Millar 2020; Ochoa 2006), this paper reconceptualizes violence as not merely destructive but as a creative and transformative force—the social engine of a vibrant soundworld.

The French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura stirred a revealing controversy leading up to her performance at the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics Games in Paris. Those on the French right criticized Nakamura’s inclusion on the program on the basis that she was nothing more than a “rapper,” saying that she sang in “who knows what” language and that her participation would “humiliate” the French public. Nakamura, whose music blends together contemporary Afrobeats, zouk, pop, and r&b, responded on social media, in brief, “You can be racist but not deaf,” and went on to deliver her Olympic performance in front of the Académie Française, the state institution responsible for governing matters pertaining to the French language. In this paper, I analyze Nakamura’s performance with a focus on her music’s use of “sound and sense” in the context of postcolonial language ideology. Drawing on virtual ethnography, I focus on her 2018 song “Djadja” (Liar) and her use of vernaculars such as Nouchi from the Ivory Coast; and verlan, a French street slang which reverses the order of syllables to create new words. I show that Nakamura’s poetic use of language is part of the song’s complex sonic texture, deepening its semiotic impact and expanding its audience. I situate Nakamura’s music in conversation with a revived interest in language ideology in linguistic anthropology (Woolard 2020, Cavanaugh 2020) and related research in ethnomusicology (Berger 2003, Perullo 2003) to analyze new contexts where Afrobeats is challenging national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

From the roar of the crowd after a goal to the chanting and drumming of hardcore fans, from the players’ grunt while fighting for position to the whistle of an exasperated referee, sound is a conduit for the circulation of emotions in Argentine soccer stadiums. Sonic events mediate experience through an affective economy that conjures collective memory, shapes behaviors, and intensifies or dulls the stadium’s atmosphere. These are not discrete affective events but episodic dramas. Each string of plays, game half, match, season, and club’s history establishes an affective disposition that grounds the appraisal and expression of emotion. This paper uses phenomenology and (auto)ethnography to expand the notion of sonic affective economies within sports by bringing together two bodies of scholarship: emotion-enhancing excitation transfer theory (EEETT) and the concept of affective atmospheres. EEETT explains how sound’s affective value increases through circulation (Ahmed 2004) within short spans of time (Zillmann 2008; Cummins and Berke 2017; Cummins, Wise, and Nutting 2012). The concept of sonic affective atmospheres (Abels 2022, Eisenlohr 2022; Ashmore 2017; Jack 2021; 2024) shows how acoustic events connect bodies through vibrational materiality and “energetic flows that affect felt-bodies while allowing for the mediation of the sonic through auditory cultures, semiotic ideologies, and other historically and social embedded traditions” (Eisenlohr 2018, 51). This work adds to recent ethnomusicological studies showing how sonic practices in sports and fandom operate as meaningful sites of political and social life (Jack 2013; 2021; 2024; Herrera 2018; 2024; Achondo 2022; 2024; Wells 2023).