Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique ed. by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (review)

This collection of fifteen essays had its genesis in a multi-year, interdisciplinary research initiative at the University of Wisconsin–Madison called "Music-Race-Empire." The scope and depth of the scholarship reflects contributions across the humanities, including musicologists and ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, anthropologists, and scholars from American studies, African American studies, and beyond. The essays range from ethno-graphically-grounded studies of popular music, to previously unexamined histories, to nuanced analyses of musical encounters in a range of imperial contexts.

The organization of this collection around things "audible" might suggest its conscious positioning under the umbrella of sound studies, a field that is invested in the history of listening and the investigation of how sound, language, and listening produce knowledge. But the introduction, by editors Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, distances itself from "problematic trajectories in what might be called the neoliberal turn in sound and popular-music studies" to focus instead on "specifically human and, most typically, historical modes of auditory action—of people performing and making 'music'" (p. 4). The project, as they conceive it, is not to treat the auditory as an aspect of empire separate from its broader structure, or to privilege the affective experience and epistemological consequences of hearing/listening over seeing/looking. Instead, scholarship in the anthology is intended to treat the audible in a dialectical or relational manner, as something which conditions empire and functions as part of its regimes of knowledge and power.

The volume is divided into four sections: "Technologies of Circulation," "Audible Displacements," "Cultural Policies and Politics in the Sound Market," and "Anticolonialism." Readers will also find worthwhile convergences if the chapters are approached in other orders or groupings; this review is meant to highlight some of the methodological and thematic connections not already suggested by the editors' headings.

In the most general sense, this collection treats music as a political and social force, so several of the chapters are about music that critiques or resists empire. This is the case with the two essays dedicated to hiphop, which has from its inception been concerned with political commentary and racial justice. Now global idioms that have spread and changed via new technologies and media, rap and hip-hop are vital means of expression for communities and individuals who have been marginalized, misrepresented, displaced, or silenced. In "Rap, Race, Revolution: Post-9/11 Brown and a Hip-Hop Critique of Empire," Nitasha Sharma analyzes the lyrics of desi rappers as they progressed from pre-9/11 critiques of postcolonial realities and American culture to articulations of a new political subjectivity that emerged post-9/11. This subjectivity of "post-9/11 Brown" reflects the shared experience of those groups targeted as "Muslim" and, spurred by the Arab Spring and facilitated by the digital revolution, has become "a pan-racial, cross-religious, and global identification among those who link racism to empire building"(p. 294). Marc Perry observes a similarly transnational phenomenon in the Cuban hip-hop scene in an essay about the convergence of American radical black activist discourse, anticolonial and anti-imperial Cuban and Puerto Rican sentiment, and growing racial identification among Cuban raperos around the year 2000.

Another major theme of this book is how imperialism has shaped the writing of music history and how archives might—or must—be rethought. Penny von Eschen models how music, such as that of Jamaican-born dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), might be conceived as an archive from which to create alternative narratives of history (in this case of the Cold War). In another essay, Brent Hayes Edwards looks at the archive of British ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey in its relation (or non-relation) to anticolonial literature about Africa. Of course, any single archive holds the potential of infinite histories, as Jairo Moreno observes...