Read more
How have sound and empire shaped one another historically? Acoustics of Empire recovers a sonic history that is bound up with imperial power and colonial rule. Bringing together contributions from historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, this book emphasizes the entangled histories of sound and empire. The intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Imperial Sounds, c. 1797
- Peter McMurray and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
- PART I. INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITIES
- 1. Grappling All Day: Towards Another History of Telegraphy
- Alejandra Bronfman
- 2. Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors' Cries
- Nazan Maksudyan
- 3. Listening to Infrastructure: Traffic Noise and Classism in Modern Egypt
- Ziad Fahmy
- PART II. TECHNIQUES OF LISTENING
- 4. Colonial Listening and the Epistemology of Deception: The Stethoscope in Africa
- Gavin Steingo
- 5. Epistemological Jugalbandi: Sound, Science, and the Supernatural in Colonial North India
- Richard David Williams
- 6. Ramendrasundar Tribedi and a Sonic History of Race in Colonial Bengal
- Projit Bihari Mukharji
- PART III. MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS
- 7. Cosmopoiesis: Stories Sung of the Equatorial Gulf of Guinea, 1817
- James Q. Davies
- 8. Listening to Korea: Audible Prayers, Boat Songs, and the Aural Possibilities of the U.S. Missionary Archive
- Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang
- 9. Listening through the Operatic Voice in 1820s Rio de Janeiro
- Benjamin Walton
- 10. Ethnography and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century France
- Sindhumathi Revuluri
- PART IV. SILENCE AND ITS OTHERS
- 11. The Anacoustic: Imperial Aurality, Aesthetic Capture, and the Spanish-American War
- Jairo Moreno
- 12. pee ä wee, an Outrageous Clatter, and Other Sounds of Acclimatization
- Alexandra Hui
- 13. Gandhi's Silence
- Faisal Devji
- Afterword: Sound in the Imperial Archive
- Elleke Boehmer
- Index
About the author
Peter McMurray is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.
Summary
Music and sound studies have increasingly turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought in recent years, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, political, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire.
Acoustics of Empire provides a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the long nineteenth century through the lens of geopolitical power, the authors recover a sonic history that is irrefutably entangled with questions of imperial power and colonial rule. This volume brings together historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to consider topics ranging from Indian music treatises and vocal practices in Brazil to Egyptian traffic noises and stethoscopes-as-props in South Africa. Across its chapters more broadly, it also draws attention to a period when Euro-American academic disciplines like musicology and linguistics were created, shaped by the imperial contexts in which they emerged. These intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.
