Exploding the Ear of American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In 2011, Kara Keeling and Josh Kun asked in their introduction to a special issue on sound in American Quarterly, “What role can sound play in analyzing contemporary debates around empire, immigration, and national culture?” Fourteen years later, we seek to reopen this question to ask, what role can sound play in analyzing the death of empire? In the first month of 2025 we have heard the Rotunda reverberate with the sounds of Nuremberg, the self-congratulatory applause of bipartisan agreement over the expedited deportation of undocumented immigrants, the brief succession of guns in the imperial genocide in Gaza, followed quickly by its resurgence in the West Bank. Before this year, we heard the chanting of protesters, students and non-students, with the vibration of the police drone and squawk of the walkie-talkie ever-present in the background. We heard the glass shatter, the gun fire, the branch snap. Many had to learn to hear differently, when our mouths were masked and our eyes could no longer create the symmetry of lip movement and speech sound.

This roundtable asks contributors to consider how the constraints of empire teach us to hear and how the unraveling of that empire requires us to hear anew. Some topics we will grapple with include sonic legacies of imperial institutions such as the university; exploration of how detaching voices from human bodies might suggest ways out from the American imperial project; listening as it intersects with queer embodiment and positionality; mis/hearing and mis/recognition across political, racial, and gendered lines; sounding diasporic resistance through memory and music spaces; noise and listening in Atlanta’s emergence as a global Black capital; and the operation of sound as a key medium for nativist claims to citizenship and dominion.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Daimys E Garcia, The College of Wooster

• Alex C. Valin, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Panelists

• Jennifer L Stoever, SUNY at Binghamton

• Daimys E Garcia, The College of Wooster

• Sara Marcus, University of Notre Dame

• Rennae Robinson, CUNY Medgar Evers College

• Isaac Jean-Francios, Yale University

Biographical Information

Daimys Ester García is a writer, artist and educator from Miami. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at SUNY Binghamton and is currently an assistant professor in English at the College of Wooster. Her work is at the intersections of Latinx literatures & studies, Native literatures & studies, women of color feminisms, and decolonial praxis with a focus on coalitional politic; her current book manuscript, Cries Across Time: Cuban-American Women Writers Searching for Connection, offers a repertoire of practices to re-connect Cuban-Americans with other histories of resistance in the US. Grounded in literature produced by Cuban-American women writers from the 1990s to the present, it tells the story of transformation from exiles living in isolation to immigrants who resist these traditions and imagine themselves in coalition with other minoritized groups in the US. Her essays have been published in Convivial Thinking and her poetry has been published in The Maynard and Chicana/Latina Studies.

Isaac Jean-François is a doctoral candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. His research spans black studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and musicology. His scholarship has appeared in Current Musicology and will be published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in spring 2025. Building on a seminar they co-taught on bodies, sensations, and the aesthetics of difference, Jean-François and medieval art historian Professor Jacqueline Jung are co-authoring a book project under contract with MIT Press.


Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis(Harvard University Press, 2023), which received honorable mention for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize and was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in literary criticism. Marcus’s previous book, the Riot Grrrl history Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. Marcus’s writing on literature and music has been published in American Literary History, American Literature, Bookforum, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Marcus's current research connects early sound reproduction technologies, the history of psychology, and conflicts over race, gender, and sexuality at the turn of the 20th century.

Ren is the proud daughter of Jamaican migrants who came to a new country not knowing what the journey would bring, but holding a burning hope that with care, diligence, and divine guidance, they would be able to build for both themselves and their children a prosperous future. At a very early age Ren knew she wanted to be a writer (creating her first multi-page poem on "Love" in elementary school), but it would take her many years to build the courage to embrace this desire and pursue it, in spite of doubts and fears, wholeheartedly. She does not regret the time it took to reach this point, though, because the journey taught her invaluable lessons on the inspiring and life saving power of storytelling. Moreover, it allowed her to define for herself the kind of writer that she would like to be. She hopes to be able to encourage everyone that she meets to tell the story only they can best tell… their own. Ren currently has the honor of working at Medgar Evers College, CUNY as a Success Coach and enjoys the opportunity to support students in the development and advancement of their personal, academic, and career goals.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). She is a founding member of the Engaged Digital Humanities Working Group at Binghamton University and Co-Director of The Binghamton Punk D.I.Y. Community Archive. Jennifer has published research in American Quarterly, Social Text, Radical History Review, Modernist Cultures, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies among others, as well as in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop (2018) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art (2021). Currently, she is co-editing Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader, with Liana Silva and Aaron Trammell (forthcoming on NYU Press), as well as the three-volume Encyclopedia of Sound Studies contracted with Bloomsbury Press (with Michael Bull and Holger Schulze). A 2018 Whiting Foundation Public-Facing Scholarship seed grant awardee as well as a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, she is currently writing a book called Living Room Revolutions: Black and Brown Women Collecting Records, Selecting Sounds, and Making New Worlds in the 1970s Bronx and Beyond.

Alex C. Valin is a Lecturer in the English Department at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His current book project, tentatively titled Low Fidelity, focuses on the intersections between 20th century Black US and Caribbean literature and sound technology and his writing has appeared in Women & Music and ASAP/Journal. He received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.