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Petal Kimberly Samuel, "The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Dineen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Petal Kimberly Samuel about her new book, the Quiet Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance, which is out now from Rutgers University Press. The book examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite, aesthetic privilege and entitlement means for minoritized people, who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, both sonically and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority black population. Thank you so much for being here today, Petal.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you.
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So, to kick us off, could you tell me a little bit about how you came to the project or the question, or excuse me, the question of the project.
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Sure. So this is one of those happy archival accidents, sort of stories of a project's genesis. So this began as a pretty different project. I came into grad school interested in questions of archival silence. So I was really a product of a certain moment in literary studies, the archival turn in literary studies. And I was also interested in questions of the voice and Creole and patois formations in Caribbean literature, oral scribal debates. And I think at the time, I was really trying to explore the capacity of literature and the arts and vernacular practices to address the insufficiencies of what I fairly narrowly, at the time, conceived of as the archive. And really thinking about, okay, what. What can art do? What can literature do? What can vernacular practices do that the historical record can't? And, you know, I think in retrospect, this was in part rooted in a certain shock of having gone so much of my education up to that point with no substantive discussion of black or Caribbean art history and intellectual traditions. And, of course, I knew there was a tradition. My family is St. Lucian, and, you know, we have a deep and vibrant connection to the island. And there was a huge poster of Derek Walcott in my living room. And so I was aware of a Caribbean artistic and intellectual tradition and a broader black and black diasporic artistic and intellectual tradition. But it really was not a part of my curriculum growing up. And so by the time I got to college and I was taking these classes on Caribbean literature and black diasporic literature and black women writers and filmmakers and Caribbean poetry, I mean, My mind was blown. I was so touched and moved by what seemed, what art and literature seemed to be able to do and capture an archive that wasn't showing up in other places. So that's all to say. I began interested in archival silence, and I was thinking with writers like Marlene or Besse Philip. Her long poem Zong had just come out. And I applied for some funding to go to Jamaica and London to visit archives there and kind of see, this is a weird way to put it, see what archival silence looks like. This is the story around the Zong massacre, that there are very few surviving archival documents about it. So I wanted to see that and see what the archive was like, experience what it was like. And it was on one of those trips that I found an old colonial correspondence between the Inspector General of Jamaica and the colonial secretary in the 1930s complaining about noise as a really serious problem in Kingston, which struck me as so strange that noise would rise to the level of that kind of concern. So I went in with an interest in silence and then ended up finding material that suggested that the policing of the soundscape and literal sonic intensity was a matter of concern for colonial authorities in the Caribbean. So that's the trajectory of what led me to this project.
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Thank you for that. It's a really fascinating project that I was.
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So.
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I feel so privileged to have read. So I'm really excited to talk more about the book. If you could kind of give us an idea of your intervention. Like, what is the book doing that's really differing from previous works on sound and Caribbean diasporic expressive culture?
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Yeah, I mean, I think first I should say how indebted I am to a really rich body of Caribbean Sound Studies scholarships. So people like Carolyn Cooper and Belinda Edmondson, Nigelle Hamilton, Isis Samaj Hall, Julian Henriquez, the list goes on and on. Alejandra Bronfman. So I had a really beautiful, dense body of scholarship to think with when I arrived at this project. I think my work is interested in taking what I learned from those works about the colonial roots of sonic surveillance. So benning on of drums, banning of instruments throughout the Caribbean, these really specific and pointed regimes of sonic surveillance, and understanding what their afterlives were in the post colonial moment. And I was also really interested in how they traveled transnationally, because part of all of the writers that I write about in the book are Caribbean diasporic writers. They live in other parts of the world and they're experiencing sonic surveillance with an intensity that really resonates with what I'M seeing in the colonial archive in earlier eras in the Caribbean. When I talked to other scholars as well about this project, other black studies scholars working in other parts of the world, so many of them had immediately were able to call upon an example of how sonic surveillance was operating in their geographic context. And so there was something there to me about a transnational web of anti black sonic surveillance, that this was a strategy that was useful across a wide range of colonial contexts and continues to be useful even in places we don't think of as under colonial rule formally anymore. So I wanted to think about how those regimes traveled and how we might understand their roots in colonial racial surveillance. The other thing about the book is that I'm really specifically interested in issues of gender and sexuality. And so a lot of the examples that I pulled from the, the archival sources, from the literary sources really expose the ways that anti black sonic surveillance, noise complaint is really veiling another kind of policing a way. It's really trying to mark black gender, black sexuality as deviant. It's a formal and informal mode of policing certain kinds of gender expressions, sexual practices that are, you know, deemed deviant. And so I wanted to make explicit that, you know, sonic surveillance, that yes, there's a history of anti blackness that I really want to draw out. And also there's a really specific targeted kind of attack on black women, queer folks, gender non conforming folks throughout the region. So that, you know, this is another way that colonial regimes of sort of, or I should say, maybe colonial strategies of discipline, disciplining the body, kind of inculcating certain mores of respectability. They exercise themselves through sonic surveillance as well. So I would say those two things are one of the ways I'm building on that body of scholarship.
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This leads me really nicely, I think, into my next question, which is how does the book mobilize and contribute to black feminist studies?
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Yeah, so I'm very indebted in the book to black feminist work on archival silence analytically and methodologically. And so, you know, how. How do we even think about the noise complaint as it appears in the archive? So how do we think about this record of a sound? How do I write about what that sound was? Right. Or how do I think about that? And so I was really profoundly impacted by work by scholars like Sadia Hartman and Marissa Fuentes. And you know, about how do we read sound in Archives of Slavery? Satya Hartman wrote something once about sound indexing what she calls a counter history of the human. And so there's a profound commitment There around reading sound as not being what Glissant once critically called the cry of the beast, but as something that has meaning and that is not senseless, that is articulating something that runs counter to the way that the archive is trying to represent their lives. And so when I'm working with the colonial archive and these sounds are appearing, it was really important to have models how to read against the grain of how people and practices are being represented. But also, I was thinking with transnational black feminist scholars like South African feminist Pum Ladineo Nkola, about sort of. So she has a. She talks about the importance of quote, making strange, making quotidian scenes strange. And she's. For her, she is describing a strategy for interrupting patriarchal power, interrupting its normalization by making strange scenes that are otherwise treated as taken for granted as life.
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Right.
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And so to interrupt those scenes to make them seem. I mean, and really not make them seem to draw out their strangeness. And so when I'm reading, when I'm dealing with archival sources that describe noise complaints, I'm really trying to read in a way and represent those scenes in a way to readers that moving against the authors, the writers, attempts to represent this as a perfectly reasonable complaint. Right. And so analytically, this is. I mean, it's part of the way that I'm analyzing the scenes, but it's also a writerly strategy. So how do I represent this to readers in a way that encourages us to take a critical look at what is happening? And I guess one other thing that comes to mind is I've been really, really impacted by black feminist work on moving beyond sort of agency constraint debates and thinking through complexity and uncertainty. And I was really trying to resist attempts in this work to sort of claim noise as this. You know, to simplify it, oversimplify it as this sort of resistive, free. Right. Inherently resistive, free expression. I mean, it's complicated, and it's complicated for people who are being cast as noisemakers. And there are ways that they are. That some figures are resisting being framed as noisemakers as disruptive. And there are other ways that people are embracing it for complicated reasons, taking it up as something that is valuable and pleasurable, even as it is stigmatizing in some ways. And I wanted to preserve that complexity in my readings. So I sort of try to avoid producing quiet or noise as either inherently liberatory or constrained, and try to think with the complexity of both.
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It makes the book so rich. Yeah, I really appreciated that.
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Thank you.
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Okay, so before we kind of move into the chapters, I was wondering if you could define for the listeners what you mean by a rhetoric of sensory rationalism, because I think this is such an important term. Right. For understanding the work that you're doing in the book. Yeah.
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So I coined that term to try to think about the rhetorical strategies that noise complainants were using in order to normalize the policing of the soundscape and in order to occlude what I read as their actual core concerns. And so when I say sensory rationalism, I am thinking of a certain affect, a certain kinds of rhetorical strategies that represent the noise complaint as eminently reasonable as really, it's not. This is not a subjective. It's not about people, it's not about cultural practices there. It's not about a phobic dispositions toward anyone. It's just a simple matter of it's midnight, it's 1am and I'm trying to sleep. And that's all this is about. It's not about a sort of phobic disposition to any particular group of people. And so what I found often in my texts and in my archival sources was that these noise complaints very thinly veiled other concerns. So, for instance, that letter, the correspondence that I mentioned earlier between the Inspector General and the Colonial Secretary was complaining about noise in Kingston, but then reveals a few sentences later that actually, you know, of course, the noise is emanating from the red light district. And we know that, quote, ladies of the life, we know what they're doing over there. And so it's, you know, and, you know, editorials do the same thing. They're like, oh, it's. We know that sex workers are, you know, are over there. But this is not about sex work.
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Right.
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This is about noise. So there was a way that the complainants would disavow their own concerns, their own targeting of particular groups and practices by saying, this is a universal good, I'm asking for something reasonable, et cetera. So that does something to cast noisemakers as, of course, antisocial, totally unreasonable, not belonging, members of the body politic, and so on. So I use that language to name a rhetorical strategy that's meant to hide things, that's meant to occlude things, and meant to kind of redirect us away from the other political programs that are operating under the COVID of the complaint. Yes. So that's what I'd say about that.
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Perfect. Okay, can you take us into the book opens with this really striking scene of schoolgirls singing Rural Britannica and So I was wondering if you could take us into what you call this haunting recurring tale in the archive of Afro Caribbean women's writing, which is this scene. Right. So how does this. The scene of the schoolgirl singing this particular song reveal the interest that Empire took in the resonance of the black body and voice in particular?
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Yeah, so this is something. This is what I opened chapter one with. And this struck me because I found examples of this very story across. There were many different Afro Caribbean women writers who told this story. I talk about Michelle Cliff, but Nourbese has a version of this story. Jamaica Kincaid does Andrea Levy. And Cliff essentially is recounting a memory of being a young girl in Jamaica being led in this singing of Rule Britannica with other young Jamaican schoolgirls and not realizing what. What the song is about, Right? And particularly the sort of line about, you know, Britain, we shall never ever be slaves. Right. And so Cliff reflects on what it means to be in, at the time, a British colony, singing this hymn about never, ever being a slave as the descendant of enslaved people, people enslaved by the British Empire. And so, you know, I think part. Part of what was interesting about this to me is, I mean, there were a lot of things that were interesting, but one. One thing is the actual key of the song. I mean, the song is triumphant. It's in a major key, right? And so on the level of sound, it is. I mean, musically, in terms of kind of musical mood, it's triumphant and joyful. And Cliff is sort of, you know, reflecting on this with the position of disturbance, right? So she's like, okay, this was a moment of colonial training. This was a kind of training happening in the register of the Sonics. So, you know, that moment, and I should say about Rule Britannica, a few years ago, actually, in 2020, there was a whole other sort of outcry about the singing of rural Britannica in the uk and there was a whole controversy about whether or not it should. It should be sung in public because of its references to slavery. And this is something that people feel really attached to, right? So it was a really huge, you know, something that should, you know, for many critics who I agree with, right, this should be a straightforward. Right. The critique is straightforward, but the attachments are powerful to the singing of this hint. Even in 2020 was when that debate happened. So that moment was a place for me to think about how colonial discipline, colonial sonic training happened in a quotidian way, not unlike the ways we get disciplined into certain forms of nationalism through singing the national anthem and so on, when you're young, Right. Before you know what that anthem represents or what that flag represents or. Right. So, yeah, that and the fact that it recurs across so many writers work just kind of spoke to its ubiquity as a practice. So why is it important for colonial administrations. And not just colonial administrations. Right. For nations to have you repeatedly sing a certain anthem. Right. What does that mean? It's a kind of training. So I wanted to think about the importance of sound and singing and the voice in strategies of sort of colonial discipline.
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It's such a striking way to open that chapter. Okay, so in that chapter one, which you title Resonance, you write that loudness in colonial rhetoric was since synthetic and multimodal. It was at once a marker of oral, visual and legal translation. So I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about that.
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Sure. Yeah. So throughout the book, I mean, I set out on a project about sound to write about what was being coded as noise and how quiet functioned. And I found that even as I was setting out to write about sound, I couldn't help but write about almost every other sensory register, that there were all kinds of ways that Afro Caribbean people and reasons why Afro Caribbean people got marked as noisy. So there were literal complaints about the voice, about instrumentation, about music and technology. And then there were other kinds of complaints, like Cliff narrates in her work, about queerness being marked as loud. And so she tells a really tragic, a really upsetting story of, you know, her parents reading her, breaking open her diary and reading it when she was really young. And this was at a time when she was around 13 years old and she was coming into her queerness, and she was thinking about writing about her love for women and writing about her feelings, about her body and so on. And her parents read her diary when she wasn't home, and when she got home, they read it aloud in front of her entire family.
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Right.
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So it was a form of discipline. And she kind of thinks about, you know, the irony there, right, that she is thinking through these things in her diary, which her parents then make public and throw into the public sphere as a form of discipline, while at the same time she's being, you know, really trained to repress any visual marks of queerness, any marks of queerness in her social and erotic practices. So I quickly encountered noisiness, loudness as not just a description of sound, but a description of sartorial practices, a visual descriptor, ways to mark gender and sexuality, ways to pull it into the public sphere and code it as disturbing as a disturbance of the piece.
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Right.
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And so that was why it was important for me to say that sound is synesthetic, as crossing multiple sensory modes as a kind of a form of transgression.
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Can you talk a little bit about how Michelle Klipp's fiction in particular is narrating the problems of sensory rationalism, the term that you gave us earlier?
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Yeah. So Cliff's work is so remarkable for the ways that it captures the day to day experience of formal and informal as well, sensory surveillance and discipline. Because obviously the archive tells one story and editorials tell one story, often concentrating on these flashpoints around which noise becomes a matter of concern for colonial administrations or for the colonial elite. But I was really interested in this web, this wider web, the informal, daily wider web. What is the daily experience of sonic surveillance? And Cliff's work does a lot to capture how that operates or how it operated in her context in Jamaica. And she also does a great job of infusing the uncanny into the everyday. And so she makes clear or she demonstrates the strangeness of colonial surveillance and sensory training. So, for instance, there's a scene in Abeng, one of Cliff's novels, where the main character, Claire, is attending her father's Jamaican Presbyterian Church, and a Scottish schoolteacher is trying to lead the church congregation in song while playing a harpsichord. But the harpsichord, unlike the piano, has no dynamic range. So it doesn't matter how hard you press the keys, it can't get any louder than it. I mean, it's as loud as it is. Right. But as a result, the sounds of the harpsichord are being drowned out by the sounds of the environment. So the traffic, the singing that he's leading the congregation in is covering the sounds of the harpsichord. And he's so sort of disturbed by this that he starts to chastise the congregation, to demand that they quiet their singing voices so that they can hear the harpsichord. And also harpsichords do very badly in hot, humid climates. And so an issue, what is actually a problem of the instrument's suitability to its environment and its context is displaced onto the congregation, who are taken up as needing some kind of sonic training. And it's so strange, but this is actually, you know, often what these. These like, sort of daily scenes of sonic surveillance look like. I mean, Cliff said in an interview once, something like, I don't need to have an imagination, I just need to record what. What I'm seeing. Which is her way of saying, you know, that the. I mean, I think It's a strategy of defamiliarization. Right. So it's a way of saying, you know, truth is stranger than fiction. All you need to do is. Is scratch the surface, is taking a critical look at just what's around you, and you'll see how strange it actually is. So sometimes she presents us with scenes that are really strange and comical, and other times those scenes are really high stakes. But if sensory rationalism's key rhetorical strategy is to, you know, veil efforts of racial, gender, and sexual stigmatization beneath a sort of neutral, common sense response to sound, then Cliff's work is undoing that veil of normalcy and neutrality by presenting these scenes to us as. As bizarre and as kind of ripe for scrutiny.
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Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, so I want to move into chapter two, which is oral privacy, so you examine how undisturbed quiet can be framed as a right attached to both property ownership and national belonging. And this is fascinating, I think. Can you discuss this a little bit more and maybe walk us through one of the really rich examples that you incorporate in the chapter?
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Sure. So, yeah, this chapter really began as an inquiry into a specific kind of strategy of noise abatement, where noise complainants will attempt to frame themselves as victims of civil or even criminal offenses. And part of the way they do this was by rhetorically claiming the soundscape around their property, around their homes, as an extension of their private property. So that noise becomes, again, rhetorically, a form of trespassing. So that was the pattern I was seeing across the examples I was tracing. And I keep saying rhetorically, because this is not legally sound at all. So you generally cannot claim the airspace or soundscape around your home as private property. At best, you can make a nuisance claim. But this is not so much, in my reading, about being able to really seek certain kinds of legal recourse, but about adopting the position of the victim of a kind of rights violation, rather than the person who is trying to police the boundaries of the neighborhood and accelerate gentrification or prevent certain people from living in the neighborhood or staying in the neighborhood. So, and this is, as an aside, this is something I noticed in the archive, is that with noise complaints, it doesn't actually matter if they go anywhere. The complaint does the work just by making the complaint. So once you make the complaint, the police are now knocking at your door. Right. And that does the work of you're being watched. Right. Right. You've been isolated as a. Or you've been identified as a sort of disturb, a disturber of the Peace as somebody who is not a belonging member of the neighborhood. And in other, the work of other scholars who talk about minor offenses just being pulled aside by the police, just being brought in if you're released immediately, that alone does the work that complainants are trying to do. So in terms of an example from this chapter, there are a few. But one of the examples I open with is this sort of high profile case of Jody Jinx, Stuart Henriquez, who is the. Who's also the wife of dancehall artist Sean Paul. She went on Facebook some years ago and was posting a complaint about her alleged, quote, neighbor from hell and who had, who had moved into her elite neighborhood in Jamaica, Norbuck. And you know, she was writing about being desperate to move. He's having these loud parties and he's riding his dirt bike through the neighborhood and he's talking loudly and he's yelling and, you know, and she's kind of declaring, I wish he would just go back to where he came from. Which is really loaded, right? And eventually the Internet deduces that she's talking about Usain Bolt, who is her neighbor at the time. And she is. The backlash is massive. So she's swiftly condemned and she issues an apology and she's saying, I should have dealt with things in a more, quote, private and civil manner and so on. And what I found interesting, of course, was, I mean, she obviously does not acknowledge the sort of underlying politics of race, class, gender there. Other people reveal it in their critiques of her. Usain Bolt, though, his reading of what happened here was that this was of course not at all about noise, but about anxieties about pathways to black class mobility. And so in his reading, you know, he noted that he felt this was really about the fact that he had been propelled fairly quickly to wealth and fame through, through sports. Right? Whereas his neighbors, you know, many of them part of the so called brown elite in Jamaica, likely went to elite schools and got jobs and worked for many years to get their footing. So there's this perception of him as having slipped through the Right. And so, you know, what he underscored was of course, that this complaint about noise was really about something else, right? And it's about curtailing black movement. It's about delegitimizing claims of belonging, delegitimizing his claim to be in that neighborhood. So, you know, that chapter, it begins with these complaints where the complainants are framing themselves as victims of these rights violations and moves to trying to understand how black mobility into and out of neighborhoods, class Mobility. So various kinds of mobility, our noise complaints can do work to try to curtail those forms of movement. And this of course, also happens on the national level as well, not just on the level of sort of neighborly disputes. So there's an example in the chapter where I think about Marlene or Bessie Phillips, critiques of the noise complaints that are routinely waged against Carabana, the Caribbean Carnival celebration in Toronto, and in 2018, the sudden cancellation of one of the centerpieces of Carabana Carnival Kingdom before it was slated to begin. And Nourbese talks about these things, the noise complaints, the withholding of permits as forms of what she calls ritual scourging. So despite the fact that Carabana generates massive revenues for the city, more than any other arts venues and initiatives in Toronto, such as the opera, the ballet, et cetera, the persistence of noise complaints are meant to convey that Afro Caribbean people do not belong there or are not right, reluctantly accepted as a part of belonging, part of the body politics. So those are some of the examples and some of the scales that I'm thinking on. Thank you.
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Okay, so chapter three, vibration. I want to ask how you see Steve McQueen's 2020 short film Lovers Rock, demonstrating the ways that, as you write, sonic intensity is valuable and pleasurable because not in spite of the fact that it can elicit certain painful, uncomfortable or illicit sensations.
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Yeah. So this chapter is, I think if you can have favorites amongst your book chapters, this one is one of my favorites, I think, because I think so my other chapters were interested in sort of probing and destabilizing noise complaints and asking, you know, what are we really talking about when we're complaining about noise? This chapter was really interested in taking up artists who did not shy away from being labeled noisemakers. They instead were saying, you know, they did not get caught up in the trap of defending so called noise against condemnation or saying, oh, in fact, you know, we're, we're not actually, we weren't actually disturbing the piece. Or instead they're saying, yes, these practices are low, are loud and noisy, and they're trying to produce a certain kind of sonic intensity. And that is the point. And you know, I found that so fascinating because they were claiming noise as pleasurable. And I think I found that fascinating because anti noise rhetoric, so often there are strains of anti noise rhetoric, if we think about medicalized anti noise rhetoric, that are really interested in foregrounding the physical and psychological deleterious effects of exposure to noise, which noise does in fact can in fact have those effects. So this is Not, I'm not quarreling with science here. So it does in fact have those effects. But what I found interesting about these artists was that they were trying to foreground other kinds of pleasures that exposure to sonic intensity produced that were important to them. And so one of the texts that I wrote about in an early version of this chapter but didn't survive into the book chapter was a short film called Mas Fuerte by Sean Frank, who's a black British filmmaker. And the short film is thinking about sound system engineers, they call themselves musicologists from the Dr. Who are operating in New York, constantly being besieged by noise complaints and people who gather to listen to the music that these musicologists produce. And there are stacks of speakers, it's super, super loud they talk about. Yes. Then the day after going to those gatherings or those parties, my ears are ringing and you know, I have temporary tinnitus, but. But that's what I went for. That's part of the pleasure. There's the tinnitus is that the ringing in the ears is the memory of what happened last night. And you know, other writers and artists who think about what it is like to gather, particularly as part of a minoritized group at a party under the COVID of loud music in your community, that there's something sensorially pleasurable about that even as you're risking other kinds of physiological things. So I was interested in this counterclaim and that's what I was tracing in this chapter. And in Lovers Rock there are a lot of scenes where loud music, you know, helps create a safe space for characters to process and transmute pain. And so it's not just that it feels good, it's that it allows them to confront or to think through or to process something that's otherwise, you know, really painful. So, for instance, were thinking about black diasporic communities, Afro Caribbean communities in London in the 80s, in Thatchers UK, who, in an environment of powerful anti black xenophobic rhetoric, the sort of proliferation of white supremacist violence against Afro Caribbean communities in London, sort of being cast as a community that is stealing jobs from proper British right who don't, who don't belong there, who are responsible for the decline of the nation and so on. And so there are scenes in Lovers Rock where, for instance, the main characters are on their way to a party. The entire film is about a party. And, and you know, they get on the bus and there's a group of Afro Caribbean teenagers with a boombox playing Caribbean music on the bus. And it does something to the public space of the bus for them, they. Public space is dangerous at this time, you know, and so the characters face these routine forms of racial harassment over the course of the film and over the course of the series that the film is a part of. But there is something that happens in the space of the party, in the spaces that are under the COVID of sound, that allow characters to feel momentarily safe, that allow them to
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sort of
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travel sonically, psychically, to a place that they're not able to go back to right now to Jamaica, for instance. So. And, you know, there are other kinds of complex, complex things that they're processing, including issues of sexual violence, which the film is really, really concerned with. The erasure of black queer communities from archives of black life in the 80s in London. These are all things that surface in the context of the party in these scenes where loud music allows characters to kind of be in their bodies, to process their environments. So, yeah, so I think the chapter is turning toward sonic intensity as pleasure, but that pleasure is also suffused with pain and processing as well.
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I can understand why it's one of your favorite chapters. It's a beautiful chapter, the way you write. The descriptions of the party scene in particular are just, like, so striking and gorgeous. And of course, Lovers Rock is gorgeous
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as well, so beautiful theme.
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Okay, so I want to move on to your final chapter. Ultrasound or subtlety? This chapter brings a critique of common sense that runs throughout. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, right? It runs throughout the book,
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but you
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bring this sort of in the forefront in several ways, into the forefront. Excuse me. So would you talk a little bit about how your book examines supposedly common sense ideas about the absence and presence of sound, and sort of how you're bringing it to the forefront in this chapter?
- [47:35]
A
Yeah, so when I think about common sense, I think about it in at least two registers. So on the one hand, I'm thinking of. I'm thinking with Stuart hall and Alan Osha's discussion of the concept, which they're drawing from Gramsci in their writing on this. And they are describing common sense in the way we tend to use it. The way we tend to think of common sense. So as a form. They describe it as a form of popular, easily available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument, does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. So it's supposed to be intuitive. It's supposed to not require forethought or reflection. It's supposed to feel pragmatic and just kind of true experientially true. And it, you know, it's, it's, it masquerades as something that's non ideological. Right. It just, it just is true. Right. And on the other hand, I'm, I'm trying to invoke the underlying image of a shared common sense, a universal way of sensing the world that can allow, for instance, noise complainants to non controversially say, obviously this should not be allowed. Obviously this is a problem for our community. So I invoke it in both of those registers. So how do ideas about sonic intensity, where do they pervade other areas of common sense? And so that chapter, maybe the outlier of the chapters, is really interested in how sonic intensity governs values of artistic expression and political speech. So thinking of sort of two related problems. One, I'm thinking about Afro Caribbean poets who write about norms around poetic performance. And what kinds of poetic performance mark a poet as part of the literary establishment. So these kind of quiet, intense performances of poetry as opposed to something like for instance, spoken word, which gets cast as, you know, many times is not high literary production. And what does that mean? So the same kind of norms that govern certain kinds of elite spaces that I write about in other parts of the book that, you know, you're in an elite space in some cases when sound is really modulated, right, it's, it's really kind of quiet, it's at a respectable volume. The same principles travel into ideas of artistic expression. And then on the other hand, I think about political speech and the sort of norms, the way that the language of sound pervades our understandings of political capacity. So that the, the sort of, the sort of, the most. The expression par excellence of political capacity is to make your voice heard or to register your voice in a certain kind of way. And all of the writers and artists in this chapter run up against sometimes fall into those norms. Other times are exiled because of their failure to abide by those norms. They're thinking about how issues of racial, sonic discipline, issues of sonic norms kind of end up pervading the literary and political spaces in unexpected ways that make it strangely more difficult. Even if they're embraced by kind of literary institutions, it makes it more difficult for them to communicate what they see as their core artistic claims. So that's chapter four is trying to unsettle some of those norms around artistic expression and political speech as they're figured through sound.
- [52:45]
B
So before we move into our kind of like wrapping up questions, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how nurbese Philip navigates this figure of the unwilling listener.
- [52:57]
A
Yeah, so the unwilling listener emerges in the context of a broader criticism or question about, as I mentioned before, the dominance of sonic metaphors to mark political capacity or to mark political constraint and possibility. So to be silenced is to be disempowered. To make your voice heard is to be politically empowered. And of course, feminists have widely critiqued both of these ideas. And I think I was also writing an early version of this chapter early in the pandemic, after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and in that moment of corporate virtue signaling, where suddenly corporations were doing a lot of we see you, we hear you, we're listening kind of public speech. And I was really curious about the political promises and hopes and fantasies that were attending perception. So it seemed that to be seen and heard by them meant something really specific and self evident. And I wasn't. I wasn't sure. To me, it wasn't specific or self evident what that really meant to be seen and heard by these corporations. And so, you know, but this too, was. Is something that feminist scholars have long critiqued. I think here of Sara Ahmed writing about the non performative so, which she describes as a yes, that's intended to enact a no. And I also, of course, think of scholars like Shaniqua Roach, Sarah Shulman and Kwame Holmes, Roger Reeves, Kevin Quashe, all scholars who were asking questions about the limits of the public sphere and of publicity, of being heard and listened to in certain ways. Shulman writes in some of her earlier work about the ways dominant groups get lauded or heroized for tolerating minorities. And so you have these minority groups organizing for these long stretches of time, advocating for certain things that eventually maybe get acknowledged or taken up in a limited way by dominant groups, and that gets cast as a kind of generosity, as a sign of the moral capaciousness of the dominant group, et cetera. And so I was really curious about how those ideas of perception could backfire, how perception can backfire. This did not survive into the chapter, but this is an example that really, I guess, lingered with me after I saw it. There was a very, very, very early Black Mirror episode in the first season called 15 Million Merits. And Daniel Kaluuya was in the episode. And it's a story about a dystopia, a fatphobic dystopia, where everyone in that world has to pedal on a stationary bike to earn these merits. I remember. Yeah. Yes. I mean, it was haunting and terrifying and, you know, they have to earn these merits to pay for their basic needs. And the main character, you know, falls in love with another character. He has inherited, recently inherited a large number of merits from his brother who had recently passed away. I think it's implied that he took his life in that episode. So he has all these merits and he's fallen in love with this other character who wants to. If you can accrue 15 million merits, you can earn the ability to be a contestant on this game show. I think it was called Hotshot in the episode. And the idea being that you could be propelled into fame by appearing on the game show. It's like some version of America's Got Talent or something. You can go on there and then you can be propelled into another life, right? You can go viral in some way. She likes to sing. He donates his merits to her because he's in love with her. And then she goes, she performs, she doesn't do well. And she kind of moves, she moves into. Another way to earn merits in this world is to do sex work. So she moves into sex work. And there's a whole other critique or a whole other analysis there about what, what the image of sex work there. But essentially what happens is that the main character decides that he wants to kind of take revenge on this society by earning another 15 million merits, getting on the show and staging a really public indictment of this corporatocracy by sort of threatening to take his life on live television during a speech where he condemns, right, the world that they're living in. And unexpectedly, though, the audience loves him and finds him really entertaining. And then he wins, like a slot, a show of his own, which buys him freedom from having to pedal on the stationary bikes to earn the merits. But, you know, the part of the show is he has to go on tv, critique this corporatocracy in order to earn money. So they've. And they've co opted his critique. So he was trying to make a public statement. This is a way of saying he was trying to make a public statement and that got seized upon by this corporatocracy. And it just doesn't end up destabilizing it in the way that he hopes it does. So, yes. So that's broadly what the chapter is about. Nurbese, in the chapter, I think about a specific short story by Nourbese called Stop Frame. And it's taking place in a fictional Caribbean village named Bethlehem, where a former Nazi has taken up residence after fleeing Europe after the fall of the Nazi regime. And he's working in the village as a dentist, and it's implied that he is effectively torturing his patients. So the village is characterized by a constant sort of stream of screams coming from the dentist's office. But, you know, it's also implied that he's well connected and he has the power to retaliate against those who complain about his practices. And. And there's no other dentist in or near the village. And so they sort of, you know, there are limits on what they can achieve through public condemnations of his practices. But the main character decides to engage in a kind of guerrilla warfare against him by making his life miserable, right? So she's doing all these things to. She's stealing from his garden all the time. She's putting itch grass in his car, so he's breaking out into hives. All she's, you know, she's making. She's making his life miserable. When she goes to the dentist's office, she. She bites him really hot, right? So then he's the one screaming when she's in the dentist's office. So there's. There. She's effective because it's not rising to the. To the level of public declaration, Right. He can't identify what's happening and why. He just knows that his life has become miserable. So the chapter is really kind of thinking about what can be possible in other registers of political speech and action. So that's how Nurbese comes into that.
- [61:35]
B
Thank you. Okay, so, yeah, my next question is, what do you want people who are reading your book or will read your book? What do you want them to do with what they learn from what they read?
- [61:48]
A
That's a great question. I mean, there are things I hope readers can take from the book, but it's also been really wonderful to hear some of the beautiful and unexpected resonances the book has had for readers. So I am really leaning into the book being its own, taking on a life of its own, having unexpected resonances with readers. But, I mean, I will say my primary hope is that readers can embrace the provocations, the book's provocations around sonic etiquette, noise and noise complaints. Early on in the book's life and throughout its life. When I was giving presentations on it, I used to have folks come up to me and say, the Q and A used to be full of noise stories. So people would say, I have a story for you. About a time that I was actually. I was literally ejected from a space, or I was cited, or I was warned, or I was Condemned because of the sound of my voice or I was in a group of people and, you know, and I. I think what was happening there. I hope what was happening was that. And what I want for readers is for them to feel affirmed in their knowledge of the kinds of racial, gender and sexual policing that's often happening in those moments. That's kind of passing as well. No, these are just the rules. And I want people to have a framework to critique what's happening, to be able to name the rhetorical strategy and to. And to challenge it. So, I mean, I also would have another kind of response. I would sometimes have people say, oh my goodness, I think I'm one of those people who complains about noise. What does this mean? Does this mean that I'm. I'm this really problematic person? And, you know, I'm. I'm always. This is complicated. Right. So I'm not. There. There is all kinds of really, really important scholarship about how noise affects minoritized communities. Right. And how they're targeted by noise. And so there are plenty of communities that are being subjected to the noise of industry, the noise of military exercises, and so on. And it has a really devastating impact on the community and the ecology and so on. So there is. There is such a thing I want to underscore as noise as part of a web of strategies meant to marginalize and disempower communities. You know, that said, I would love for readers who recognize something in my work to have some kind of framework to think about what else noise can mean for communities to whom it means something. And so if it can be thought provoking in that way, I will be satisfied. And otherwise, I'm really open to other kinds of meanings that the book generates with its audiences. Yeah.
- [65:41]
B
So my last question is, what are you working on now?
- [65:46]
A
So I'm working on two projects right now. We'll see how that goes. Moving between two projects at once, I couldn't quite decide which I was more. I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches. I'm happy to be excited about two things. One of them is more connected to this work that I have done on the Sensorium. And it's a project on black femme haptics. And I'm thinking of the narratives that accrue around the way black gender feels or should feel or can feel. And I think this is prompted by a curiosity that I think I share with a lot of people about the kind of. The emergence, dominance of soft life rhetoric in the public sphere that seems to articulate a certain kind of yearning for black gendered repair, at least that's how I read it. So this sense of softness as a way to repair or restore or address certain kinds of the. The legacies of certain, like institutions of the. The legacies of slavery, for instance. So this idea, the idea of course is like, as you know, that women and femmes should not, should be able to. Should not have to work quite so hard. Right. And that our ancestors worked hard, they were in the, the fields, they did not have a choice. They couldn't rest. They couldn't. Right. And so this idea that to, to rest now, that this is a kind of repair, this is a kind of generational healing. And you know, and of course, as with everything, this is complicated. So it's. Some of it, you know, is a response to the worsening conditions of labor. Real responses to kinds of strain, hopelessness, fatigue, other times, and sometimes at the same time it seems to reify certain traditional ideas of gendered embodiment, feminine softness. And I'm curious about the kinds of the. The kinds of language we use to describe gendered embodiment. And so that, that's one project on black femme haptics. There's another project that is interested in Afro Caribbean new media forms. So I'm interested in animation and video games as archives of sort of understudied archives of Afro Caribbean creativity and the ways that artists in those mediums are collaborating in many cases quite intimately with writers. And so how Caribbean literary production dovetails with these other media forms and how we can understand the ways those forms are trying to respond to the political imperatives of those of their moment. So two quite different projects. One a more natural progression from the current project, the other a move into a really different kind of medium.
- [69:46]
B
Those both sound really fascinating. I can't wait to read them and hopefully you'll come back and talk to us here about those projects when they're. When they're done.
- [69:54]
A
Thanks so much. I mean, it was such a joy to talk to you. Thank you for your very close, careful reading of my work and your thoughtful questions. And I am very excited by your work and excited to read more of it. So thank you so much.
- [70:11]
C
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education.
- [70:18]
A
It.
- [70:19]
C
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