UC Irvine

“Paradigmatic Accoustics: Blackness, Performance, and the Quotidian Politics of Sound” focuses on black music and performance that operate in the rising dominance of telecommunications. Communicative capitalism names the conjoining of the telecommunications industry (radio, television, cinema, and the varying digital platforms) and financial speculation during late capitalism that blurs the boundaries between civil society and social surveillance. Black music figures as a prominent force in the rising profits and power of the telecommunications industries. My research identifies how black music is used as a sophisticated means for commodifying the participation, attention, and affect of the general public using digital interfaces. The first part argues for a different view than one that see "riots" as "the language of the unheard.” Instead, this project explores how the rebellions operated as an active resistance to communication, forming a politics of sound, relation, and care that affirms the non-communicable and poetic aspects of black antagonism in an active refusal of the confluence between communications technology, police power, and politics. The second part historicizes this telecommunications boom as an aspect of what Dr. Saidiya Hartman once called “the afterlife of property” and the theories of commodity, subjectivity, and property that racial slavery and anti-black racism produced. By centering the social predicaments and existential conditions that Black performers work through, my intellectual project explores black music as a key site to interrogate the shifting meanings of the political in our moment. In this way, blackness is more than its contemporary ubiquity; instead I argue that black sound and performance displays how black voice is a troubling presence for communicative capitalism and theories of political subjectivity in general.