In a 2015 op-ed for the New York Times, poet Claudia Rankine describes in vivid details how

African Americans are haunted by the trauma that ensues from an unrelenting history of racialized violence. Connecting the dead and dying in the hulls of slave ships to those beaten and lynched under Jim Crow, in addition to the growing litany of Black folks shot dead in the streets and killed in churches at the hands of vigilante cops and white supremacists, Rankine surmises that “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.” Rankine’s treatise on racial trauma echoed the earlier work of scholars like Saidiya Hartman (1997), Dorothy Roberts (1997), and Joy DeGruy (2005) whose research illuminates the distinctiveness of Black racial trauma as systemic, intergenerational, and integral to the social fabric of the United States itself. Over the next ten years, racial trauma became a prevalent theme in the creative artworld, especially within Black horror films and television shows. From Get Out (2017) to Lovecraft Country (2020), Candyman (2021) to Sinners (2025), each of these productions creatively use racial trauma and differing modes of Black storytelling to depict the struggle for Black life/survival amidst the afterlives of slavery. This paper investigates how contemporary Black horror blurs the line between fiction and reality through the strategic deployment of silences, quiet soundscapes, and distorted audition, creating the very foundation on which the horrors and trauma of Black being-in-the-world are constructed for audiences in ways that haunt us long after the credits roll.

China’s zero-COVID regime collapsed in December 2022, after years of coercive control generated widespread suffering and culminated in nationwide demonstrations unseen since 1989. Its political residue quickly congealed into a familiar public secret (Taussig 1999) within China’s taboo-laden political history—known, felt, and carefully unsaid. In major cities, it also left behind a legacy of expanded administrative capacity, intensified surveillance infrastructures, and economic strain, all of which renewed the state’s strategies and urgency for urban redevelopment. How, then, do residents sense and make sense of authoritarian memory inside a tightly governed, rapidly gentrifying urban core? This paper juxtaposes two hyper-local voices in one urban neighborhood of Shanghai: (1) a public-housing resident who routinely screams fragmented accounts of neighborhood-level corruption and dispossession from her window, and (2) a villa-dwelling socialite—descended from a persecuted pre-1949 bourgeois family—who now leads neighborhood history tours in collaboration with the local propaganda bureau. I highlight how these voices—one disruptive yet publicly ignored, the other sanitized and valorized—materially shape their surroundings and reorganize listening relations. Together, they render palpable colliding temporalities of cyclical political trauma. In tracing how these voices are cultivated, heard, managed, and talked about, I theorize a “negative space” of public secrecy through which residents co-exist with, domesticate, or reenchant tabooed histories in order to survive—and sustain—the post-socialist neoliberal present.

At the outset of Buddhist rituals, artistic performances, and even to start each day, many Cambodians use music, whispers, or the acoustically silent vocal practice of “speaking in the heart” (niyāy knung citt) to engage ancestors, deities, and deceased teachers. Those practices’ acoustic and non-acoustic sounds effect ontological conjunctions of living and dead, the then and there brought into the here and now in a continual play of difference. By examining those practices, this paper reaches beyond acoustics to show a different way of conceptualizing sound that flows from a form of subjectivity largely absent in prevailing understandings of emotions, wellbeing, and temporality, when living people, deities, and the dead are co-constituted through relations of mutual care. Moreover, by situating those practices within Cambodia’s fraught climate of post-genocide commemoration, the paper offers a counterweight to the prevalent notion that healing from trauma occurs through a universal psychotherapeutic process built on liberal models of political agency and testimonial voicings of past violence, which humanitarian activists and scholars have prescribed for Cambodians. Instead, I demonstrate that emotional responses to violence and other challenging events can exist within people’s lifeworlds and should not be considered part of a separate psychosocial domain. By ethnographically exploring those lifeworlds, and by expanding ethnomusicological considerations of voice to include speech uttered in the heart and words spoken by incorporeal entities, I offer that Cambodians’ longstanding practices of sounding relations of mutual care with the dead help them cope with the effects of Cambodia’s late-twentieth-century violence.

This paper discusses the limitations of testimony as the sole site of liberation for survivors of sexual violence. In the U.S. judicial system, emphasis is placed on sounding, as dichotomous to silence. The idea of “giving voice to” one’s pain, or “speaking one’s truth,” are idiomatic examples of how lexical, narrative, speech is correlated with 1) liberation and empowerment, 2) the pursuit of justice, and 3) providing a credible account of one’s experiences. The emphasis on the individual capacity to sound one’s truth reflects a belief that everyone can be heard, everyone can speak, and that narrative recall is both possible and preferable. Here, linear narrative testimony is prioritized as a form of sounding that demarcates credibility and truthfulness, and correlates to liberation, healing, and justice. Within western judicial systems, the entrenched idea is that proclaiming “one’s truth” through narrative utterance is, in and of itself liberating, just as silence is cast as disempowering or shameful. Based on research that delineates the effects of trauma on recall and memory processing as fragmented, disjunctive, and incomplete, (Ehlers & Clark 2000; Chatterjee 2018; Westera et al. 2017), I explore how survivors are often placed in danger of re-traumatization and harm within judicial procedures, and take stock of the limits of verbal language in the narrative of remembered violence. This paper provides insight into the dichotomous positioning that limits the capacity to hear survivors fully and posits a vulnerable listening model that invites expansive expression into framings of healing and justice.