The Sounds of Equality: Reciting Resilience, Singing Revolutions
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SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
When the pandemic hit the world in late 2019, the concept of lockdown ceased the social life of the people and their communities. In these unprecedented circumstances, a video from Italy took the internet. People in Italian towns such as Siena, Benevento, Turin, and Rome were singing from their windows and balconies, which raised morale. The song “Bella Ciao,” an old partisan Italian song, became an anthem of hope against adversity. This anti-fascist song was popularized during the mid-20th century across the globe as a part of progressive movements. Following this, people in many countries around the world created their renditions of “Bella Ciao” in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, French, Spanish, Armenian, German, Portuguese, Russian, and within India in languages such as Punjabi, Marathi, Bangla, and even in sign language renditions. It was such an apt moment that captured the idea of empathy, solidarity, and the human need for community. This moment was still resonating with me when I was approached by Goethe Institut, New Delhi, to work on music and protest, and create The Music Library. I knew what I needed to do.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe Music Library was conceptualized as a weekly playlist of protest songs. I believe protests are not just demands but are aspirations, unfulfilled promises that truly represent the resilience of people. I could not imagine anything more beautiful than protest music to represent the world, as it amplifies human desires for connection and better days ahead. I designed it as a weekly music bulletin that people could dwell in for half an hour, and it would be like a short musical insight to that country or theme. Although the project had to be cut short due to institutional limitations, The Music Library creted 36 weekly playlists focused on liberation movements, anti-colonial struggles, people’s uprisings, and popular expressions of dissent.
The Music Library hosts two types of playlists: issue-based and country- or region-specific. This approach curates and classifies music for a broader audience attuned to these categories. When I prepare a playlist, the first thing I seek is to incorporate marginalized and diverse voices. Diversity can be based on caste, gender, language, region, and more. I typically favor field recordings, amateur productions, and emerging artists. Occasionally, the featured artists have as few as 50 views on their videos. After listening to numerous songs and consulting individuals with greater expertise, I select 5-8 songs and then write a blurb to introduce the playlist. Sometimes, I also seek help for language assistance. In that sense, it’s a very collaborative effort. The Music Library’s mission resonates with Merje Laiapea’s mapping of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion through music. The Music Library similarly engages protest music, but with a wider array of areas and themes.
After the first few weeks, I decided to transition from Indian protest music to global and I wanted to foster a gradual introduction instead of a snap transition. I realized that inviting guest curators would enable the transition to linger on for a bit before settling in, and the guest curators would have a much better idea of the protest culture in their respective country and/or area of research. For example, Sara Kazmi, a scholar-activist-singer from Pakistan, curated a playlist on protest music of Pakistan; Yueng, who is researching Hong Kong music for his Ph.D, curated a playlist on The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. So their expertise and knowledge of respective countries give us a better sense of what protest music is for people there than I could provide on my own. Like Sara and Yueng, many of the guest curators have either been part of protest movements or have written, observed, or researched closely. Likewise, there are guest playlists by musicologist Lucas Avidan that emphasize the prominence of hip-hop music, or as some call it “Bonga flava” in Tanzanian protest music, and a playlist on MC Todfod, an emerging rapper from Mumbai Hip-Hop collective Swadesi who passed away at the age of 24. Protests themselves are essentially about bringing people together and working together. In this sense, the co-curatorial process resonated with the idea of protest music itself as a collective action.
The idea of protest is essentially an act, attitude, orientation, and assertion against the dominant conservative system. So, in that sense, its definition is as varied as the kinds of conservatism existing in societies. It could be based on class, caste, gender, race, nation, region, language, food, and culture. In short, protest music means speaking up against power. Protest music plays multiple roles for the people practicing it or whom it represents. In a highly unequal power relationship, it is like a crack or a rupture against hegemony. In others, it asserts power. For many, protest music symbolizes an idea, utopia, like one world or Begumpura, i.e., land without sorrow, in 15th-century saint-poet Ravidas from India. With old social issues such as casteism, patriarchy, feudalism still lingering around and consolidating, and capitalism and nationalism getting strongholds across the globe, the world is more fragmented and hostile. In this situation, the protest music from around the world raises some particular issues but also many universal ones, such as equality, recognition, dignity, food, housing, healthcare, education, and above all, the right to live as an equal citizen. The Music Library brings all of this protest music under a single umbrella, as all this music has one thing in common: Resilience! At times, The Music Library is a music room that soothes, and other times a war cry for equality!
Bangladesh’s playlist, for example, curated by Dhaka-based artist, Emdadul Hoque Topu, is based on Liberation War songs. The Liberation War was a unique liberation movement based on linguistic identity. So, language, a mode of expression like music, was at the heart of the movement. Interestingly, when the recent popular uprising occurred, I was in Dhaka and saw the popular resentment against the Liberation War and its icons. It shows that protest music is as evolving and contemporary as any other expressive form, one age’s protest song could later turn into a voice of the oppressor or used to oppress any dissent. For instance, Rajakars, a term that till recently had very negative connotation due to its association with the detractors of anti-liberation, has been employed and repurposed in a chant or slogan ami ke, tumi ke, Rajakar, Rajakar (who am I, who are you, Rajakar, Rajakar) for the current uprising that led to the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina-led government.
In another instance, the historic Farmer’s Protest of 2020-21 in India–termed the biggest movement in recorded history– has led to a proliferation of music to bolster it. Though the protest started in the north Indian state of Punjab, it spread across India and drew global support. Punjab is a musically unique place; it is one of India’s most popular and prolific independent music industries. Due to early migration history, Punjabi music has spread globally and has been adaptive of derived from various musical cultures such as rap, pop, etc, while maintaining its distinct linguistic identity. This made the Punjabi music popular and relevant beyond its linguistic boundaries. The movement has been chronicled by a newsletter called the Trolley Times, where I worked as a co-editor. Numerous Punjabi singers have contributed immensely by producing music and being part of the movement. After a long time, a strong impulse in the popular cultural sphere evolved in solidarity with the mass movement.
The Music Library was under construction when the world was going through a pandemic, and unprecedented isolation, a hallmark of oppression. In the pandemic, when people were dying, this quote became popular: Corona is the virus, Capitalism is the pandemic. People could see the havoc of capitalism playing out in full public display from the first world to the third world. Someone who is cornered, pushed against the wall, with no recourse to grievance redressal, cries out to make themselves count, and find solidarity and rise. I designed The Music Library to show how music can break a slumber and bring people to march together, similarly to what “Bella Ciao” did during COVID-19.
It began as a hum that was joined by neighbors, and then it spread, loudly, across the world as an expression of solidarity and resilience. “Bella Ciao” is such a marvellous testimony of what music can do and has been doing! I hope The Music Library serves as a humble repository of this resilience.
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Featured Image: Image of “Bella Ciao” being sung in Santiago, Chile during the ‘estallido social’ (2019) by AbarcaVasti, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Mukesh Kulriya is a Ph.D. scholar in Ethnomusicology at The Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of music and religion in South Asia in the context of gender and caste. His Ph.D. research examines bhakti, or devotion practices within the ambit of popular religion in Rajasthan, India. Since 2010, he has collaborated on India-based projects centered around the craft, culture, folk music, and oral traditions as an organizer, archivist, translator, and researcher. He also works on global protest music and currently working on a podcast on Music and Hate.
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#MMLPQTP Politics: Soccer Chants, Viral Memes, and Argentina’s 2018 “Hit of the Summer”–Michael S. O’Brien
A Tradition of Free and Odious Utterance: Free Speech & Sacred Noise in Steve Waters’s Temple–Gabriel Salomon Mindel and Alexander J. Ullman
Singing The Resistance: January 2017’s Anti-Trump Music Videos–Holger Schulze
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SO! Amplifies: Immigrants Wake America Podcast and the Work of Engaged Digital Humanities
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
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Conceptualized at a time of rampant increase in anti-immigrant violence, Immigrants Wake America is a creative response to the growing bias and violence against immigrant women in the U.S., as seen in the Atlanta shootings, the rise in hate crimes since the onset of Covid-19, and the US-Mexico border crisis. We believe that storytelling allows us to find similarities and differences between ourselves and others, offering a humanizing counterpart to harmful media narratives. The podcast creates a living archive of stories not yet heard, serving as an audio intervention into how immigrant women’s (hi)stories are narrated and passed on.
Immigrants Wake America is a public humanities, community-engaged project of digital storytelling through podcasts, in partnership with the Tenement Museum in New York. It features storytellers who share their family stories about migration and the centrality of women in their life histories. These storytellers have submitted stories to the Tenement Museum’s digital archive Your Story, Our Story (YSOS),
Founded in 1988, the Tenement Museum, focuses on immigration and immigrants to “foster a society that embraces and values the role of immigration in the evolving American identity.” YSOS cofounded by Annie Polland and Kathryn Lloyd, is a digital archive that houses stories associated with immigration, migration, and cultural identity. Some of the storytellers are first generation immigrants, while others are descendants of immigrants, born and raised in the US; their great-grandparents or grandparents migrated to the US ages ago. Through YSOS, the Tenement Museum invites people across the country to share their stories in the online digital storytelling exhibit. Each story reveals one individual’s experience. Together, the stories help us see how the unique histories shape the nation, and the patterns that bind us together.
Through exploring and curating stories from Your Story Our Story, we facilitate conversations that supplement and expand it. This makes possible the conception of an archive that is both dynamic and collaborative. Such an archive resists the colonization and appropriation of lives and narratives of our storytellers. We navigate through the ethical conundrums that one might structurally and personally face in this collaborative endeavor. In our engagement with the archives at the Tenement Museum, we believe that our podcasting project really opens up the possibilities for an expansion of the archive.
We released our first episode, the Introductory Episode on January 15th, 2022, and have since been consistently releasing one episode per month.
While our podcast does not claim to retrieve or lay out these microhistories in their entirety, at an early stage of its development, we came to realize the potential that the form of the podcast itself offers for a different kind of storytelling. In our podcast, we treat stories as primary documents instead of marginalia. Michelle Caswell (2014) uses the term “symbolic annihilation” to describe the absence or misrepresentation of marginalized communities in archives. She advocates the powerful forces of community archives in countering “symbolic annihilation.” In thinking about archives in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault is concerned with “the density of discursive practices” wherein he observes “systems that establish statements as events and things (145)” This system of statements (as events or things) is what contributes to the law of what can be said. Processes of digital communal archiving such as those done by South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) or the Tenement Museum attempt to extend or expand the systematic possibility of events and things. Caswell and her colleagues have demonstrated the importance and success of the SAADA project. They have also pointed to the impossibility of representation in a traditional archive which is built on violence committed on colonized and enslaved bodies, also eloquently pointed out by Saidiya Hartman’s scholarship.
Through our experience we’ve learnt that podcasts can serve as a transgressive-dynamic expansion of digital archiving, given their unique ability to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions and their potential to expand the current techniques and media of digital archiving. We map this formal potential of the podcast in the way it intersects with digital archiving in the following ways:
First, narratorial voice.
We wanted our project to act as an intervention in the way in which immigrant women’s (hi)stories are consumed and passed on. We wanted to provide counter narratives. It was essential that the storytellers share their stories in their own voices, literally! The audio medium allows us to produce a space for listening to voices that are otherwise marginalized and/or demonized.
–Le Li and Shruti Jain
Among the several unique and inspiring stories of resilience that the Tenement Museum houses, one such is a story by an immigrant case manager at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, Goretti Mugambwa. The museum and our podcast make it possible for her story to be narrated by herself in her voice. With her experience of working with the refugee and immigrant community she also does not just remain an individual voice, but acts to further a collective assertion.
Next, sonic variations.
Our storytellers’ voices are not just “characteristics” of the story but are an essential part of the story itself. We believe that each immigrant and their descendent brings to the story their unique tonal texture. This diversity destabilizes what immigrants and their descendants are expected to sound like. The sounds we add in the editing process are minimal. We try not to impose emotional cues and responses upon our listeners.
–Shruti Jain and Le Li
The multiplicity of voices in our podcast–and therefore in the archive–are not just “characteristics” of the aural storytelling or listening process, but are as much an essential part of the story itself. In line with what The Sonic Color Line reminds us, our work also finds that, “sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelgänger in U.S. racial history” (Stoever 4). This leads to the coding of race as not just visual but aural too. We want to clarify that the white constructed ideas of how people of color must sound flatten out the complexities in how people within and across communities do sound. At the same time, these notions of white sonic normativity also create a strong sense of what one must or must not sound like in order to succeed in the racial capitalist world order. The storytellers of our podcast and we ourselves are of diverse backgrounds. This, for us, is a way to demonstrate the “complex range of sounds actually produced by people of color” (Stoever 43). As Nancy Morales argues in “Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging,” the sound of ‘everyday voices’ mobilized against—and remarking on—the nation-state’s attempts to mark immigrant communities as vulnerable exerts an impactful and profoundly material agency.” With its conversational and collaborative format, our podcast serves as a dynamic medium to represent (his)stories that complicate generic conventions in critical ways.
Then, collaboration.
We have also been personally deeply impacted by the process of working on this podcast. We have made lasting bonds with our colleagues and storytellers alike. The storytellers of our podcast act not just as guests, but as collaborators and stakeholders. Instead of interpreting the stories in our own way and retelling the stories, we collaborate with the storytellers, and facilitate the unfolding of hidden stories by the storytellers. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. Together with Lloyd and Yun, we built a project on the ethos of collaboration.
The editing process of IWA too, is different. Rather than making individual editorial decisions, we engage the storytellers directly in post-production. After finishing a first edit of an episode collaboratively between ourselves, we then send it to the storytellers for their feedback and approval before releasing it. Sometimes, the storytellers do suggest changes. Based on their feedback, we re-edit the episode and eventually release it after the storytellers approval. We have also innovated methods of community editing, where we edit in groups of as large as 15 people.
Finally, accessibility.
The podcast medium makes Immigrants Wake America an ideal project for the public humanities. As opposed to lengthier podcasts, each episode of our podcast is edited down to 15-20 minutes. These can be used by educators as an in-class resource to generate discussion and activities. Community listeners could tune in during lunch breaks, get-togethers, cooking, driving or doing chores. Our episodes can also serve as conversation starters and help facilitate affective bonds among immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
The final episode of our first season, “Finding Our Grandmother in the Records,” aired just last week, and a second season is in the works.
As a way to expand this project, our second season will feature storytellers from our local community in addition to Your Story, Our Story. We plan to have units within our project dedicated to translation, recording and editing, and creating teaching resources. We aim for meaningful and engaged conversations and try to blur the supposed boundaries between the university and the community. Join us!
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The first season of Immigrants Wake America was sponsored through the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University and a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been our advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. IWA is available on major streaming platforms such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, and Audible.
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Le Li and Shruti Jain are pursuing their PhDs at Binghamton University in the Translation Research and Instruction Program and the English Department respectively. They were Humanities New York Public Humanities fellows (2021-22) and graduate fellows of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Binghamton University (2021-22). Through their podcast project and their work with digital community archives, Le and Shruti are currently working on exploring intersection between podcasts and digital archiving. They try to capitalize on the unique ability that the form of the podcast offers to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions, which makes possible the conception of an archive that can be both dynamic and collaborative. Le’s research interests include translation studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and public humanities. Shruti’s PhD focuses on the Enlightenment, British Empire and the relationalities between race and caste formations.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig all this good stuff about sound studies pedagogy! Good luck with Fall semester, folks!:
“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig
SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes
The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes
Making His Story Their Story: Teaching Hamilton at a Minority-serving Institution–Erika Gisela Abad
Teaching Soundwalks in a Course on Gentrification, Black Music, and Corporate America–Rami Toubia Stucky
Deejaying her Listening: Learning through Life Stories of Human Rights Violations– Emmanuelle Sonntag and Bronwen Low
Audio Culture Studies: Scaffolding a Sequence of Assignments– Jentery Sayers
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
“Toward A Civically Engaged Sound Studies, or ReSounding Binghamton”–Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom–D. Travers Scott
SO! Podcast #71: Everyday Sounds of Resilience and Being: Black Joy at School–Walter Gershon
Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul– Brooke Carlson
A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
My Voice, or On Not Staying Quiet–Kaitlyn Liu
(Re)Locating Soundscapes of Schooling: Learning to Listen to Children’s Lifeworlds–Cassie J. Brownell
If You Can Hear My Voice: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching–Caroline Pinkston
Mukbang Cooks, Chews, and Heals – David Lee
SO! Podcast #80: Refugee Realities Miniseries–Steph Ceraso
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