Is sound henceforth inseparable from our sense of home? In a shifting field of aesthetics and affect, sound has impact on subjectivity, consciousness, relationality, attentiveness, and therefore it has ramifications for ethics and politics.
This proposed project is a critical intervention in the fields of comparative literature, aesthetics, and postcolonialism. While sound has been long studied in relation to music, cinema, whether for strategy or benefit, its emotional, ethical, and political impact is less attended to in contexts which stage shifting power.
For the future to be our "home," it would require fundamental capacities, “the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future,” writes Shoshana Zuboff. (Zuboff, 4, 20) Sound, in its force and intensity has impact on those very capacities, on the individual and collective possibilities. The possibility of a future cannot be imagined without that of home. Evoking fundamentals necessary to human emancipation, artworks preoccupied with a sense of “future” and “home” interrogate its possibility as “mastery, voice, relationship, and sanctuary: part freedom, part flourishing...part refuge, part prospect.” (Zuboff, 5)
Considering the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar as well as the videography of Larissa Sansour, I ask the following questions: What are the present conditions of sound in relation to how a place is lived? How does sound, when it issues from conditions of violence, become a mode of control, depersonalization? Will a regime of soundscape in global sites of conflict supersede a “politics of listening” or “the permission to narrate”? How does sound then is marshalled in these artworks to address and withstand a regime of the carceral?
