In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has been devoted to critiquing the settler-colonial epistemologies embedded in 'acoustic ecology,' particularly in relation to R. Murray Schaffer and the World Soundscape Project (Robinson 2020; Hagood 2021). While this work has illuminated the indigenous erasure and environmental imaginaries shaping late twentieth-century listening listening practices, comparatively little attention has been paid to parallel ecological discourses within Black music. Many artists associated with the 1970s jazz avant-garde developed novel ways of theorizing relationships between human and non-human actors, instantiating them in new musical and pedagogical forms.

This presentation examines these questions through the music and pedagogy of Robert Northern (Brother Ah). After performing with leading jazz artists in the 1960s, Northern developed a set of relational listening practices in the early 1970s that he referred to as “sound awareness,” an encompassing philosophy of ecological listening shaped by his travels across the African continent and by Afrocentric thought. As an instructor at Dartmouth College (1970-73), he developed pedagogical practices oriented not only toward trained musicians but toward “anyone who would awaken to music in the natural world.”

For Northern, communion nature and with an ancestral homeland were inseparable; nature’s real or imagined wholeness served to counteract the violent rupture of diaspora, providing rootedness to those who have been forcibly uprooted. Situating Northern alongside contemporaries such as Sun Ra, and drawing from theorists Fumi Okiji and Kodwo Eshun, this paper reframes 1970s Black experimental music as a crucial, yet overlooked, site of ecological thought.

On a rainy September afternoon in 2010, members of the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band departed South Rich High School for Chicago's Chinatown Square. The patter of rain on concrete and metal was cut by snares and the opening strains of Sun Ra's "Space Is the Place" (1973), as the once-empty agora filled with uniformed bodies in musical lockstep. This flash-mob performance marked the culminating event of visual artist and scholar Cauleen Smith's residency with Chicago art organization Threewalls, during which she organized performances of Sun Ra’s archive with different South Side high-school marching bands.

This paper examines how Smith's performances activated archival materials to broaden networks of South Side identity and diasporic memory. Drawing on Daphne Brooks's (2021) theorization of sonic curation as Black feminist labor of Black cultural stewardship and transmission, I frame Smith's work as a form of sonic curation that activates Ra’s archive through cross-cultural performance.

My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I contextualize this particular engagement within Smith's broader Arkestral Marching Band project. Second, I examine the flash-mob as evoking a ritual site where social relations are organized and restructured. Pairing performance and musical analysis with accounts from Smith herself, I show how the marching band structure and flash-mob staging adapt Sun Ra's repertory to engage South Side communities in Ra's spirit of collective minoritarian resistance. The choice of Chinatown Square situates the event as a cross-cultural encounter in which Afro–Asian coalition is enacted through live performance.

Tactical urbanism is a term used to describe do-it-yourself, citizen-led interventions in urban space, such as painting bike lanes, putting up stop signs at unsafe intersections, or installing café tables and planters without government approval. Though its detractors criticize a potential disruption in social order, its proponents advocate for its nimble approach to urban problem-solving through non-governmental means. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Julan Henriques, archival research at York University and NYU, and fieldwork in Toronto and Brooklyn, this paper connects tactical urbanism to diasporic Caribbean performance practices through an analysis of Toronto's Caribana and Brooklyn’s Jouvé, the largest Caribbean festivals in North America. I argue that Afro-Caribbean street performance, built upon long-standing practices of resistance strategies to colonial oppression, are a form of subaltern territorial claim and improvised spatial reorganization within the urban environments of Toronto and New York City. In doing so, I aim to both reframe and expand tactical urbanist discourses to highlight/include the sonic and performative and bring the concept of tactical urbanism to bear on ethnomusicological case studies. My paper will analyze the ways that Caribana and Jouvé, which use sonic and visual/performance practices to claim urban space and assert Caribbean presence, operate as citizen-led interventions that address issues of invisibility and marginality that diasporic Caribbean citizens encounter in North American metropoles.