The Ambience of White Supremacy
Talk by Seth Mulliken (Boston, US).
This talk seeks to examine the intersections between race and sound, and specifically make audible how the history, mechanisms, and practices of white supremacy work through sound. The project brings together two threads: first, from sound studies, that the practices, technologies, materials, and cultural contexts of sound are utilized in a variety of ways to both reify oppressive forces and to challenge them. The second thread, drawing from scholars of race such as Richard Dyer and Christina Sharpe, is that whiteness articulates and reinforces its supremacy and dominance through a contradictory duality: it is both completely present and ubiquitous, while also seemingly also absent and inaudible. The “ambience” of white supremacy is the name for the processes, practices, and technologies of sound that seek to support white supremacy, while also making sound’s own racial dimensions inaudible.
My project begins from the foundational work of scholars Stoever and Eidsheim in examining and mapping how sound comes to represent race, and to reinforce the “sonic color line”. Expanding on their work, my project seeks to find what technologies, practices, and contexts of sound both include and exceed representation through materiality and relationality. If white supremacy gains power through its relationality between the audible and inaudible, then any challenge to its dominance must take account of its ability to “cross boundaries”, to reinforce itself by creating links across distinct technologies, materials, formal techniques, time, and space. It is in this boundary-crossing that white supremacy can be heard as “ambience”, a formation that begins with sound, but is able to move through sets of “resonances” of other materials, technologies, and practices.
Examining the ambience of white supremacy is not only a project to diagnose and map whiteness. It is also the opportunity to emphasize how a variety of media texts, technological practices, and sonic behaviors are engaged in resistance to white supremacy through its ambience. Mapping the ambience of white supremacy provides a chance to acknowledge and celebrate the forms of resistance, especially by folks of color, to white supremacy. To define and address the ambience of white supremacy, this project examines three sites of reinforcement and resistance. Each site is a distinct analysis, but the three are culminative, each contributing to complexity and diversity of both the ambience and the forms resistance takes. The first is close text reading of two films, 2022’s Elvis and 2018’s Sorry to Bother You. In both films, formal boundaries between the diegetic and non-diegetic are collapsed and blurred, allowing voices (and other sounds) to exceed their cinematic embodiment and spatiality. Elvis uses this ambience to center Elvis Presley and his whiteness historically. Sorry to Bother You finds revolutionary possibilities in Black folks using white supremacy’s ambience against it.
The second site is an analysis of the discourses around AI-generated music. Through an examination of popular music press and comments on AI music sites, I argue that the fear and panic that infuses the discourse is recognizably racialized. Drawing from scholars Kodwo Eshun and Alexander Weyehile, the technologies of music creation and production resonate with racialized histories and contexts, and these racialized contexts inform how the “panic” of AIgenerated music is articulated. Through this analysis, I’ll propose two specific aspects of the ambiance of white supremacy that can be drawn out from the “panic” around AI-generated music: its desire to create a fictive purity for itself, and also its work capture and contain the creative works of people of color, esp. Black folks. Through Eshun and Weheliye, I’ll propose a method of examining Black popular music and technology that challenges these attempts at containment. If the ambience of white supremacy works to protect both its apparent purity and claim its sole ability to cross boundaries (to be both embodied and disembodied) then Eshun and Weheliye present an analytic to counter it and to reveal the weaknesses of the supposed purity.
The third site of analysis looks at videos shot by participants on their phones from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol building. By listening closely to three intertwining aspects of these videos: voices, sound technologies such as megaphones and speakers, and the microphone on the phone itself, this site examines the how the ambience of white supremacy works through the practices of sound technologies, i.e. what people actually do with the sound tech available to them. I argue that the crossing of technological and formal boundaries here is the ambience of white supremacy made most audible. As a site of resistance, I’ll examine the use of similar sound technologies, voices, whistles, loudspeakers, and the phone microphone in resistance movements to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in my home city of Providence, RI. Drawing on my own ethnographic research as a member of ICE-watch groups, I’ll argue that these techniques seek to challenge the ambience of white supremacy that gives ICE agents power in their attempts to be both audible and inaudible.