How do sound, militarism, and ecologies relate to each other? Mindful of Jim Sykes’s criticism of a tendency in sound studies scholarship to attend to the most spectacular aspects of “wartime sound and listening,” we are particularly invested in contributions decentering “war” or, rather, showing how it is already dispersed through militarized ecologies. We seek to remain mindful of the profoundly uneven asymmetries that mark the workings, experience, spatializations, and life-and-death gradations and permutations of militarized ecologies. We do not conceive of “militarized ecologies” as a thing, as an already constituted field of inquiry or current topic, or as a discrete set of sites and sounds that can be archived, but as an invitation to consider how these auralities and terrains have come to distinguish themselves and in turn prompt proliferating interpretive gestures. How is sound central to these processes? The keywords auralities, incorporations, and terrains are not postulates but prompts, each of them registering a degree of irresolution while opening, in their juxtaposition, what we hope is room for critical vacillation.
Introducing the Special Series: “Militarized Ecologies: Auralities, Incorporations, Terrain”
Alejandra Bronfman, Professor of Caribbean, Latin American, and Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, is a cultural historian of the Caribbean with research interests in the production of knowledge, racialization, and technology’s role in the amplification of marginalized voices. She is the author of Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016). Currently, she is working on an environmental and media history of decades of military occupation in Culebra and Vieques, Puerto Rico.
María Edurne Zuazu works in music, sound, and media studies and researches the intersections of material culture and sonic practices in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge (and of ignorance) in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. María has published articles and essays on telenovela, sound art installation, music videos, online concerts’ liveness, weaponized sound, and audio surveillance. She received her PhD in music from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and has been the recipient of Fulbright, Fundación La Caixa, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities fellowships. María is currently working on her book project, Ruin Sound.
Alejandra Bronfman, María Edurne Zuazu; Introducing the Special Series: “Militarized Ecologies: Auralities, Incorporations, Terrain”. Resonance 1 December 2023; 4 (4): 348–352. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2023.4.4.348
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