A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change. In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.

From the gospel music of slavery in the antebellum South to anti-apartheid freedom songs in South Africa, this two-volume work documents how music has fueled resistance and revolutionary movements in the United States and worldwide. Political resistance movements and the creation of music—two seemingly unrelated phenomenon—often result from the seed of powerful emotions, opinions, or experiences. This two-volume set presents essays that explore the connections between diverse musical forms and political activism across the globe, revealing fascinating similarities regarding the interrelationship between music and political resistance in widely different geographic or cultural circumstances. The breadth of specific examples covered in Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism highlights strong similarities between diverse situations—for example, protest against the Communist government in Poland and drug discourse in hip hop music in the United States—and demonstrates how music has repeatedly played a vital role in energizing or expanding various political movements. By exploring activism and how music relates to specific movements through an interdisciplinary lens, the authors document how music often enables powerless members of oppressed groups to communicate or voice their concerns.

This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse. Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities. Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

Since ancient times, music has demonstrated the incomparable ability to touch and resonate with the human spirit as a tool for communication, emotional expression, and as a medium of cultural identity. During World War II, Nazi leadership recognized the power of music and chose to harness it with malevolence, using its power to push their own agenda and systematically stripping it away from the Jewish people and other populations they sought to disempower. But music also emerged as a counterpoint to this hate, withstanding Nazi attempts to exploit or silence it. Artistic expression triumphed under oppressive regimes elsewhere as well, including the horrific siege of Leningrad and in Japanese internment camps in the Pacific. The oppressed stubbornly clung to music, wherever and however they could, to preserve their culture, to uplift the human spirit and to triumph over oppression, even amid incredible tragedy and suffering. This volume draws together the musical connections and individual stories from this tragic time through scholarly literature, diaries, letters, memoirs, compositions, and art pieces. Collectively, they bear witness to the power of music and offer a reminder to humanity of the imperative each faces to not only remember, but to prevent another such cataclysm.

Performing a political identity usually involves more than just casting a vote. For Left-wingers in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus – countries that emerged as the only non-socialist constituents of South-eastern Europe after WWII – political preference meant immersion to distinct ways of life, to ‘cultures’: in times of dictatorship or persecution, the desire to find alternative ways to express themselves gave content to these cultures. In times of political normality, it was the echoes of such memories of precarity and loss that took the lead. This book explores the intersection between the politics and cultures of the Left since the sixties in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. With the use of 12 case studies, the contributors expose the moments in which the Left has been claimed and performed, not only through political manifestos and traditional political boundaries, but also through corporeal acts, discursive practices and affective encounters. These are all transformed into distinct modalities of everyday life and conduct, which are commemorated, narrated or sung, versed, painted, or captured in photographic images and on reels of tape. By focusing on culture and performance, this book highlights the complex link between nationalism and internationalism in left-wing cultures, and illuminates the entanglements between the ways in which left-wingers experienced transitions from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa. As the first book to analyse cultures and performances of the Left in the three countries, The Politics of Culture in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus causes a rethinking of the boundaries of political practice and fosters new understandings of the formation of diverse expressions of the Left. As such, it will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of cultural and social anthropology, modern European history and political science.

The story of one musician's journey to discover how music can be used as a political tool, for good and bad.