My article “Music, Sound, Politics” was just published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, online here. When Shalini Shankar first invited me to contribute an article, I knew I wanted to bring research on music and sound into direct dialogue with political theory. I was especially driven to query the hegemonic liberalism that guides academic discourse about music and sound.
Because ARA reviews are an opportunity for both critical reflection of past work and rhetorical suggestion for future work, the potential for paradigm shifts is a task I took seriously. I was humbled by the invitation because so many ARA articles have been so influential on my work since entering grad school two decades ago. I didn’t feel worthy. I thought of collaborating with a co-author and brought this idea to my colleague and mentor Ana Ochoa, who has co-written three (!) ARA articles. She was very encouraging — bordering on insistent — that I take the project on myself. All of my explicitly theoretical work has been written with collaborators (David Novak, Thomas Adams, and Alex Chavez) and Ana convinced me to take the opportunity to lay out my own contribution to the study of music, sound, and politics.
After reading 300 or so writings I indeed found I had a unique intervention to make. But from that first discussion with Ana, what the process taught me is how inseparable my ideas are from the intellectual community that I’m a part of. That this article is solo-authored is a falsehood. Not only is every word at least half someone else’s, the thinking behind the words came out of dozens of exchanges that entirely reshaped “my” contribution. I had hoped to make an extended acknowledgement in the article notes but the editors at ARA are rather tight on their word limits. So here I want to shout out some of the many people whose generosity is behind whatever intervention the article makes.
Any originality to my thinking is actually a result of continuous dialogue with Lee Veeraraghavan. Her influence is most detectable in the overall framing of the piece, not only because she shared an article by Jairo Moreno and Amy Cimini that provided me with the analytical frame of the “fiduciary contract,” but because she encouraged me to approach the major trends in political research in relation to liberalism as the overriding condition of possibility.
The challenge is that much research on music and sound is not transparent or even self-aware about its debt to liberal logics. David Novak suggested that I stage a dialogue between music studies and cultural anthropology, which is how the political theorizing of Povinelli, Mazzarella, Jobson, Jansen, Juris, Graeber, and other anthropologists were used to reframe the work of music- and sound-centered theorists.
That is not to say that ethnographers of music and sound have nothing sophisticated to add to political theory. Matt Rahaim sent me back to a founding premise of political ethnomusicology, rooted in the metaphysical-meets-Marxian ideals of Charles Keil and Thomas Turino, whose work was guided by the premise that the social power of participatory performance can be transformed into revolutionary political power.
One intervention the article makes is to show how theorists consistently approach musical activities and objects as “prefigurative” of better futures. It was Michael Birenbaum Quintero who offered me this observation that music and sound are frequently called upon as models of ideal social relations. MBQ also pushed me to be specific about critiquing the limits of liberal logics, especially in romantic idealizations of the politics of recognition as well as tactics of resistance. In the closing paragraphs of each section, I offer an explicit turn to work that upends tacit presumptions about music as a social good.
Speaking of Marxist friends, Shannon Garland also encouraged me to think further about limitations of “identity politics,” particularly the challenge of retaining focus on social class and labor politics at the center of analysis that has privileged disparity in terms of race and gender/sex.
Louise Meintjes trained her feedback on the architecture of the piece, which is built around the four areas where research on music, sound, and politics has concentrated most. In conversation with Louise, I devised the word pairs that became the subheadings — resistance and dissent, identity and recognition, affect and belonging, and power and dominance — and fortified the progression of the individual sections, so they each begin with foundational work and conclude with recent work that formulates a meta-critique of what came before. As a general rule, the literature cited in each section moves from studies that largely affirm the political efficacy of music to those that are more skeptical.
The fifth and final section turns to recent interventions on the politics of life and the possibilities of the “otherwise.” Cody Black was critical of how I had initially approached this and other work in terms of temporality, pushing me to be specific about the “otherwise” in relation to both unfolding presents and possible futures.
I could say much more about numerous other suggestions from these friends and colleagues that permeate the article, and I’m doing a true disservice in minimizing the input from so many others who shared their thoughts with me: Maria Fantinato, Anna Gatdula, Farzaneh Hemmasi, Shalini Shankar, and Benjamin Tausig, as well as the amazing students in Anna and Louise’s classes. These are just a handful of scholars whose work left a deep impression on my own. While my name is the only one listed as author, the work itself arose out of this web of connections.
Matt Sakakeeny 