Questions in Black sound and sonic geographies

American Association of Geography

Panel Presentation

What are the spatial contours of black sound? What are some iterations, notes, scripts, or possibilities within the emerging field of black sonic ecologies and black sonic geographies? How can one detect or follow a “black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011)? What is being listened to and what is being heard? What have you been taught or teaching yourself to hear? 

What do you consider noise? Who and what hears black sound as a nuisance? What does noise, nuisance generate? 

How do black people know and order their environments through sound? How does black sound operate at scale? What are the black sounds at work, at play, as contestation? What is the outside of black sound? What does black optimism, Afro-pessimism sound like? What is the relationship of black sound to governance, to state operation, to the un/doing of power? How does black sound think abolition and the dismantling of borders, both of the state and of disciplinary knowledge? How does black sound approach ecological violence, loss of biodiversity, zones of abandonment, pollution, and waste? 

Does black sound disrupt the enclosure? How does black sound resist or flee? 

How are geographers engaging black sound and black sonics? How do we hear the condition of embodied otherness, that which has been constructed in opposition, as falling outside of state-sanctioned majoritarian publics? (Roane 2023). How does auditory and spatial governance manifest within black cultural spaces? (McElroy and Werth 2019; Summers 2021; Ramirez 2021). How does sound enact possibilities of worldmaking, and how do we become more insurgent in our listening? 

Such questions work to illuminate the often-unquestioned normative and methodological assumptions one might carry in the acts of sensory perception that shape our time in the field or the archive. The mode or method of questioning can help ensure that our listening as geographers comes from a place of “radical openness” to the black sonic unfolding of the world. Thinking with Anthony Reed, how do we listen to “black sound beyond the herding effects that discipline any experience of sound--starting with the epistemological and ideological mechanisms by which we separate music from random noise [...]” (Reed 2021)

We invite geographers, artists, activists, and others to contribute questioning interventions on, within, and toward black sonic geographies and ecologies. This panel particularly invites scholars, activists, artists, and sound practitioners whose work engages questions of race, blackness, and sound across national and diasporic contexts.

We encourage works in progress, notes, imaginings, soundings, silences, noise, quietudes, distortions, ambiences, soundscapes, poems, play, or dj sets that seek to make clearer, more heard the object of black sonic geographies. 

Submissions and Questions can be addressed to 

Antipod Sound Collective

antipodsoundcollective@gmail.com