Volume 8, Number 1, 2022 Sound Acts, Part 2: Receiving and Reflecting Vibration Guest-edited by Patricia Herrera, Caitlin Marshall and Marci R. McMahon

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This essay analyzes aural fugitivity in archives of nineteenth-century freak show performers Millie Christine McKoy and traces the difficulties in staging these archives for twenty-first-century audiences. Aural fugitivity couples theories of Black fugitivity with sound studies analysis of enslavement and nineteenth-century performance in order to explore the legacies of freak show and sideshow performers who were also enslaved. This essay, taking as an object of analysis the author's own creative work based on these archives, traces the biography of the McKoys alongside their performance strategies that resisted full archival capture through fugitive sound.

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This essay is a critical narrative of an experience of listening to the Wooster Group’s The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation (2017). The performance is a verbatim recitation of a 1965 ethnographic recording by Bruce Jackson of African American men toasting and singing works songs just before Texas prisons were desegregated. African American actors on stage hear the album through earpieces and re-perform songs and toasts in real time as the LP plays on a turntable visible (but mostly inaudible) to the audience. Their interpretation “transmits” the album to an audience. The essay, continuing that work of transduction, draws from the psychoanalytic notion of “free association” in order to think through the possibilities and limitations of listening across race and gender. It argues that association is a reciprocal way of listening and making theatre. It is also a way of working through history (recorded and unrecorded) in the face of intractable frameworks of racial antagonism in the United States. The essay assembles and “associates” photographs, songs, and excerpts of interviews with the show’s makers, as well as pairing concepts from the literature of listening and the archive of Black sonic performance.

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Listening to Country was an arts-led research project where, as an interdisciplinary team of practitioner-researchers, we worked with incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to produce a one-hour immersive audio work based on field recordings of natural environments. The project began with a pilot phase in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre (BWCC), Australia, to investigate the value of acoustic ecology in promoting wellbeing among women who were experiencing separation from family, culture, and Country (ancestral homelands). The team facilitated a three-week program with the women, using arts-led processes informed by visual art, performance, Indigenous storywork, and dadirri (deep, active listening). The soundscape presented here is a response to the creative process that we led inside the prison and the audio work that the incarcerated women co-created with the research team. The accompanying text describes the background to the original project, the process we undertook in the prison, and our methodology for translating knowledge from the research based on the acoustic and poetic resonances of our experience.

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In this article, the author attends to how performer Cardi B employs urban vernacular aesthetics to articulate a ratchet, diasporic feminism. Beginning with her early Instagram videos and participation in Love and Hip Hop: New York and followed by her commercially successful song “Bodak Yellow,” Cardi B mobilizes her work between diverse musical genres and sonic registers, challenging listeners and the music industry to find room for the particularities of her ethnic and racial identity and the type of feminist practice she lyrically articulates. The author interrogates how Cardi B’s chart-topping songs, Instagram videos, and interviews on talk shows and online operate as sonic strategies that challenge, disrupt, and reject respectability politics. In turn, the author highlights how Cardi B engages with gender, class, and sexuality, proudly claiming her positionality as a former erotic dancer/stripper in order to craft a sonic narrative, framing her current success as predicated on her diligent work ethic and immigrant roots.

EN:

In the opening to every episode in the Japanese anime series GANGSTA., the following notice appears: “Due to the nature of the main character, subtitles will appear in some places.” Such a narrative choice challenges what it means to hear, revealing how deafness offers more in the way of hearing than its normative definition suggests. GANGSTA.’s portrayal of how the deaf hitman Nicolas Brown uses sound to challenge ableist conceptions of deafness shifts the voyeuristic ear on disability from the so-called disabled body to the able-bodied. To hear sound is a political act, such that it is necessary to ask who has a claim to this sensory experience. What currently qualifies as listening is based on an ableist listening experience, and while the deaf and hard of hearing may utilize other modes of listening, it does not mean they have no say in the realm of sound. Thus, I examine how the aural aesthetics of deafness can be used to disrupt and restructure an ableist politics of listening through the ear.

EN:

Merging sound studies, performance studies, and jotería studies, this essay documents sonic moments and memories of 1990s Los Angeles at Arena, a nightclub frequented by queer Latinx youth. Building on Alexandra Vasquez's "listening in detail" and Karen Tongson's "queerly listening," the author argues that jotería listening is an auditory practice and methodology employed by queer Latinx communities engaged in world-making strategies. Through jotería listening, we are able to hear sonic memories of Arena, which map moments of collectivity, community building, experimentation and resistance against hostilities encountered by jotería youth in LA in the 1990s. Highlighting three soundmarks or recognizable sounds—whistles, foot-stomping, and clapping—and their meanings, this essay maps corporeal and embodied performances of self and community as it documents critical moments in jotería histories of nightlife in Los Angeles.