- Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique ed. by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan
Audible Empire is an interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging field of “sound studies”; it seeks to understand empire “within the sensory realm of the auditory” on a global level (1). Empire here reflects imperial structures that yield and sanction particular kinds of musical availability, reception, and production. That definition encompasses both tonality and instruments, drawing listeners “into a vast network of language, supra-linguistic sensory fields, regimes of knowledge, and new modes of subjectivity” (13).
The book is subdivided into four parts, including technology, displacement, the market and anticolonialism: “Technologies of Circulation” explores the history of electrical recordings at the beginning of the twentieth century (Michael Denning), the juxtaposition of cigarette smoking (and production) and jazz in Shanghai between the two World Wars (Nan Enstad) as well as Chinese-language musicals in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Andrew Jones). Technology, the authors imply, is a category and space that can be manipulated for both musical and non-musical ends. Part Two, “Audible Displacements,” focuses on the mobility of music. The fact that music could be moved, Philip Bohlman argues, had profound ramifications for the configuration of race, music, and empire in places as varied as India, Iraq, and Brazil. US imperialism in particular had a way of appropriating sounds (and silencing others) from people who did not participate in the imperial venture, most of all in jazz (Jairo Moreno). Displacements are also at the heart of singers such as Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, whose cross-cultural music defied single-origin location (Micol Seigel). Likewise, “sound maker” Arnulfo Augilar used his art to voice concerns regarding an age characterized by deportation and border militarization (Josh Kun). In “Cultural Policies and Politics in the Sound Market,” several authors further expand the capitalist underpinnings of the empire: Penny Von Eschen examines dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s biting critique of racism and apartheid in the context of the late cold war. Marc Perry reflects on his memories of a hip hop Festival in Cuba, in 2000, finding that the line between empire and revolution has become increasingly blurred. Morgan Luker’s analysis of tango history and tourism in Argentina highlights the futility of ascribing regional or racial origins to this particular genre. And Gavin Steingo’s analysis of current South African kwaito music reveals that in the contemporary world of capitalist mechanics, empire may be audible in the very act of listening, as the market determines who will (not) be heard.
Finally, the section on “Anticolonialism” explores modes of reactions to and the relativization of empire. Brent Hayes Edwards studies scholar Hugh Tracey’s archive of colonial recordings, a repository of sound that [End Page 191] reflected alternative readings of non-colonial sound. Amanda Weidman looks at the role of music in two novels by E.M. Forster and Rabindranath Tagore. She contrasts the controlled nature of the nationalist “anthem” with colonials’ perception of their subordinates’ tonality, one that proved ultimately uncolonizable. Here, the flexibility of empire comes into focus: it cannot control everything or, rather, can control only by flexibility and “laissez-faire.” How this may be done is the subject of Nitasha Sharma’s fascinating account of post-9/11 “brown” musical identity as explored in Arab–and US–Muslim rap, which oscillates between cooptation and distance. Kofi Agawu’s essay on European efforts to impose western tonality on Africa in the nineteenth century seeks to delineate how institutions framed, cut, and controlled musical sound in the colonies.
While the diversity of topics and disciplines make it difficult to extract any one single conclusion from this collection, its central contention is clear: the constitution of empire depends as much on sound as it does on language and other forms of cultural power. At the same time, the sound of resistance, adaption, and exclusion also shapes empire and its limits.
Interdisciplinarity is a tough call; it frequently fails at the threshold of disciplinary judgment. Historians may...