Sonic Violence and the Far Right

• In Event: Listening to Justice, Listening to Injustice

Abstract

Sound’s ability to impact the body and cross borders places it firmly within the remit of criminological concern. Although sound continually emerges as a feature of far-right protests and riots – such as through music, chants, singing, yelling, and drumming – the role sound plays for far-right groups has nevertheless gone untheorised. To address this, in this presentation I discuss the concept of ‘nationalist soundscapes’, which describes the way far-right groups deploy sound as a form of violence to effectuate a politics of power, domination, and nationalist superiority. In reference to a selection of far-right events, I discuss how far-right groups deploy sound to claim and (re)territorialise space for themselves, while simultaneously displacing others. I discuss the way nationalist soundscapes are used to generate affective atmospheres that not only reconstitute the spatialities over which they are projected, but so too the collective bodies that come to inhabit them.

Author

• Liam Gillespie, University of Melbourne