introduction

Sound and Activism

Listening and Responsibility

Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell

Can sound be a platform for activism? Beyond the possibilities of articulating

cultural discourses of representation, can sound intervene to trigger changes
in the status quo of those withstanding the pressures of marginality? These
questions lie at the core of this themed issue of Americas: A Hemispheric Music
Journal, shedding light on the political potential of sound and aurality to contest
the asymmetrical effects of power.
In the last decade, scholars have alerted us to how the neoliberal movement
of capital not only de- (and re-)territorialized identity discourses through
the global circulation of practices, symbols, meanings, and people; this flux
also underscored the importance of aural messages in the production of
cultural capital in globalization. This “intensification of the aural,” it has been
argued, points to the increased importance of sound and aurality to frame
the experience of modernity.1 In our current global cultural moment, such
intensification has made graphic print and silent reading just one instance of
the process of signification.2 Yet, as with any text, aural records are sensitive to
power imbalances that permeate the social relationships in which writer, reader,
and text move. In this regard, Karen Dubinsky and Freddy Monasterio remind
us that cultural texts can remain framed in the signifying logics of exoticized
difference. In their piece about Cuban music without Cubans, the authors warn
about how cultural exoticism can pin identitarian discourse in a politics of
difference, where identity emerges only in relation to commodity value, moving
in a symbolic economy of desire. In contrast, Olivia E. Holloway broaches
aurality as a performative strategy to redress cultural symbols and the narratives
they articulate. In her piece about women and feminist activism in capoeira, the
author reads cultural practice not as a peripheral representational discourse. For
female capoeira practitioners, music and sound enable performative spaces to
intervene traditional male capoeira narratives. Performance rewrites capoeira as
a cultural text and reframes gender in response to women’s intervention. Thus,
aurality and performance revalorize capoeira’s discursive potential.

Copyright © 2022 University of Colorado

 As active elements in the production of narrative, language and text are
both sensitive to power tensions. The institutional arrangements that organize
dynamics of collective bargaining in society establish a protocol through which
to communicate with the state. This protocol produces a sanctioned semiotic
field for the circulation of messages and symbols, thereby threading culture
through the logics of power that structure the public sphere. Sound, however, can
unsettle language by opening symbols and texts to collective interventions that
reinterpret meaning. In his piece about music and communism in relation to the
music of Hans Eisler, James Parsons broaches songs as texts where listening can
become a political act. Parsons shows that in his songs, Eisler sought to enable
listening as a critical response cutting against the grain of poetry, through which
audiences could resonate with him politically. As the author shows, Eisler did
not seek complacent sympathy from an artistically fulfilled listener. Rather, the
composer set a text so that the listener could take it as a point of action against
ideological persecution and marginality.
Parsons suggests that, insofar as all texts remain open—for only the reader
can complete a text by materializing its message through action—a text is the
very staging of desire amid social and power relationships. This is important to
consider, especially when scholars have contested the idea of sound as a more
democratic point from which to express the experience of modernity.3 For
while the intensification of aurality has certainly decentered modalities for
the encoding and reading of messages, this has resulted in the establishment
of institutional protocols for the articulation and voicing of discourse, the
enhanced circulation of different media formats notwithstanding. Control
over recording technologies, as well as formats and platforms of mediation, has
reproduced power tensions meant to discipline the very condition for speech.
What can we say about sound and aural enactments that contest such logics, or
that lay outside this purview? What about those instances that bring into relief
the mechanisms of oppression that structure and censure communication, and
make discourse vulnerable to violent silencing?
Insofar as language and speech are sensitive to discipline, undisciplined
sound (political acts of speech, aurally deployed) outside this domain can only
be registered as noise, an utterance trespassing a sanctioned semantic field,
which ought to be silenced. Noise is prone to be quelled because recognizing
the stakes and claims it poses as legitimate can have unsettling effects in the
public sphere. This is because recognition implies not only the limits of order
and discipline but the very limits of language in its disciplined social domain.
It is through the sheer volume created by resonant utterances and participatory
listenings that noise acquires corporeal definition in a collective arrangement
that demands a response, that insists on the relevance of a kind of speech that
moves between sound and noise. Speech that moves between noise and sound

viii Americas · Vol. 30

Copyright © 2022 University of Colorado

lives in a threshold between denial and recognition, refusing to accept the
materiality of exclusion, and making aurality a point of political transgression,
which, while unrecognized, is undeniably sensed, dangerously felt.
Thus sound becomes a political form of contestation that seeks responsibility.
Responsibility means not necessarily a communicative gesture threaded
in the officiality of sanctioned rhetoric but a response to speech. In this sense,
responsibility entails a call to action. Such action pertains not only the
“giving an answer to” but also—and more importantly—the situations of
being responsible to those who call.4 As such, responsibility entails a shifting
political paradigm for the social function of language in relation to sound.
This is because sound unsettles language by shifting the focus away from the
communicative and disciplining impulse of sanctioned narratives, to the
site of opposition, resistance, and discursive struggle. In this site, speech acts
disrupt language by diverting focus away from the exclusionism characterizing
official communication, paying heed to a performative and unstable point of
encounter between questioning and listening entities. As aural speech acts
become intrusive, they acquire contestatory weight and material relevance,
seeking presence more than communication: the questioner is not waiting to
obtain information from his query; “he knows what there is to find, but he wants
to touch it and bring it to light.”5 Here the purpose of speech is not to solicit
information but to elicit a response, and to establish a relation of power between
questioner and questioned. It is by this very act of speech that the questioner
establishes a right to question, to expect answers, and a power to elicit them.
In this process, sound speech acts do not overcome language as much as they
emerge from it and seek to affect it, making it a contentious and unstable site of
political action. As an activist medium, sound makes language a locus for the
exercise of power struggles and political interventions, seeking responses that
can affect the fabric of the social.
It is in this sense that Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Beatriz Goubert, and Juan
Fernando Velásquez Ospina approach sound events in Colombia as collective
acts full of political meaning, articulated by a desire for political intervention in
the structure of the state. Events such as el cacerolazo, cacerolazos sinfónicos, and
flash mobs performing the Himno deconstruído show how sound can trespass the
silencing threshold of official political discourse, and the potential of aurality
as a field where people can stage desires and demands, and effect objective
changes. In his interview with Colombian composer David Gaviria Pedrahíta
(who wrote Himno deconstruído) Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina extends this
point, emphasizing how sound speech acts can inspire collective engagements,
appealing for responsibility on the part of the state. Likewise, Gaviria Pedrahíta
reiterates that such appeals can establish complicit relationships with the
aim of transforming language and narrative by overlapping, reconfiguring,

Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell ix

Copyright © 2022 University of Colorado

and resignifying symbologies through performative processes. Ultimately,
this transformation (along with the promise of collective responsibility) can
reconfigure the arts as activist arenas.
This issue of Americas closes with a conversation with Ana R. Alonso-Minutti,
in which this author touches on the political significance of performance. For
Alonso-Minutti, the performance of her composition Voces del desierto became
a collective site to contest the criminalization and murder of undocumented
immigrants in the Rio Grande region. The piece inspired the engagement of
community members whose vocal performance created a new sense of cultural
memory. As performers voiced the names and stories of those who died crossing
the river, they became inserted in the imagination of people through a collective
act of mourning.
Thus, sound enables a sensorial staging of desires, opening a text that seeks
completion in a responsible listener beyond complacent hearing. Sound as
activism entices the listener to engage with a text transactionally, to respond to
it, moving beyond it and into action. Such engagement makes itself felt in the
new social relationships where we supplement, modulate, and transform our
stories in response to a call.

Notes
1. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification
and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America,” Social Identities 12, no. 6 (November
2006): 804.
2. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1991), 7.
3. Alejandro L. Madrid, “Landscapes and Gimmicks from the “Sounded City”:
Listening for the Nation at the Sound Archive,” Sound Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 129.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 61.
5. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 284.

x Americas · Vol. 30

Copyright © 2022 University of Colorado