In 1940, the African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner arrived in Brazil with the mission of studying the African diaspora in Brazil through their language and sounds. By recording those sounds, Turner not only documented Afro-Brazilian traditions but also captured a broader sonic environment of Bahia at the time. In addition to a large repository of Yoruba songs and stories, which had been widely studied, he also recorded shows and music from the Rádio Sociedade da Bahia. I argue that these recordings deviate from the researcher’s original archival intentions. How are these radio recordings heard today? I propose two contemporary modes of listening. First, I developed a curated podcast that recontextualizes Turner’s radio recordings through historical framing and critical commentary, reactivating their circulation for present-day audiences. Second, through collective listening sessions with undergraduate music students at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), I proposed an activity in which participants creatively engaged with the recordings: the collective selected two musical pieces and rerecorded them. Both approaches suggest reenactment as a collaborative method of sonic inquiry. Drawing on four years of archival research at the Archives of Traditional Music, as well as press and oral sources in Salvador, I argue that these recordings illuminate urban musical practice in early 1940s Bahia and reveal radio’s role in shaping regional and national identities. By combining archival analysis with experimental listening practices, this paper demonstrates how historical recordings continue to generate meaning through contemporary audition and performance.

This paper examines how people across opposing political stances wield state, popular, and musical archival practices to variably construe Sikh militants as either martyrs to censorship, or as murderous censors. The term “Archival Violence” here is literal, not metaphoric. It refers not to concerns with epistemic inequity in recording practices, a trope of prior generations of postcolonial scholarship, but to a common trope in contemporary Punjabi popular song: that of heroic militants whose armed uprisings against the unjust states of both colonial-imperial and postcolonial India are murderously repressed, and obscured within dusty, inaccessible state archives. Contemporary Punjabi pop singers attempt to position themselves within electoral and theological-political conflicts via these musical references to archival violence. Militants subsequently draw upon these songs to explain and justify their own actions. Conversely, Hindu Nationalist publications now portray contemporary Sikh militants as incarnations of prior decades of censorious assassins, including those murdering All-India-Radio personnel. By drawing on these histories, Hindu nationalists site contemporary Sikh militant pop songs within a supposedly continual history of murderous Sikh censorship. This paper draws on these vernacular archival practices, state archives, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with persons (and embedded in organizations, including state archives) in contemporary conflict over Sikh militancy, and over its multiple, particularly musical histories. I argue that constructions of musical history and censorship within these historical narratives are not just byproducts, but weapons in Sikh war against the Indian state, in populist Hindu nationalist war against these militants, and in the imperial-nationalist imaginaries of both sides.

For Bloomington, Indiana-based community radio station WFHB, the summer of 2025 was a time of both commemoration and catastrophe. In the same month as the station celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, the politically right-leaning 119th U.S. Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among other organizations, and thus stripping crucial resources from thousands of non-commercial media outlets nationwide. For WFHB, this meant the loss of one-quarter of its annual budget. In this paper, I examine mobilizations of materials from community archives at the station’s public celebration of its first half century as acts of organizational sustainability and placemaking at a time of crisis. I argue that the multimodal collages of archival materials and live sonic performance comprising the event’s sensory environment are attempts to resist dominant sociopolitical imaginaries of the station’s local and regional context that serve state- and institution-sponsored neoliberal agendas, though in practice, they may also reify uncritical nostalgic senses of place and belonging. WFHB’s usage of community archives in public programming nevertheless demonstrates a wide range of possible understandings of localness through voices of past and present. These, in turn, make a case for the significance of independent, grassroots media based in ideologies of accessibility and diversity. Understood in their spatial and social contexts, I hear in WFHB’s archival practices intentions of critical aural utopianism that bear close on-the-ground scrutiny amid U.S. community media’s struggle to adapt to new economic and political realities.