Sounding Out! Podcast #61: Ni Le Pen, ni Macron: Parisian Soundscapes of Resistance

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What does the opposition to global Trumpism sound like? Or the opposition to neoliberalism? With extreme centrist Emmanuel Macron the frontrunner and eventual winner of the French presidential elections, there were calls from the Left to take the struggle to the streets, rejecting both the fascism of the Front National and the continuation of the neoliberal status quo. This podcast puts the listener into the midst of the many demonstrations in Paris and its suburbs during the presidential election campaign. By listening in on these recordings (made over the course of three months of fieldwork) we hear a determination to fight for a genuine alternative to state repression alongside the difficulties in uniting a divided left. These recordings also provide a testament to the horror of police violence and an opportunity to reflect on the value and limitations of black-bloc tactics.

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Naomi Waltham-Smith is Assistant Professor Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A graduate of the University of Cambridge and King’s College London, her research sits at the intersection of music theory, recent European philosophy, and sound studies. Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration comes out with Oxford University Press on July 1, 2017 and she is writing a second monograph on The Sound of Biopolitics. She has published articles in journals including Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, and boundary 2, and writes reviews for the LA Review of Books and b2o. She is currently engaged in a multi-site, comparative project on “Listening under global Trumpism” that involves building a sound archive of resistance on the streets in the US, the UK, and France; for more information or to contribute recordings, please send an email to naomiwal@sas.upenn.edu.

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Featured image is of a black bloc demonstration on May Day in Paris. Image used with permission by the author.

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