Boogie, Silence, Sync: Sounding the End of Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel interrogates the sonic dimensions of late-stage American empire, exploring how sound—whether music, noise, or silence—reveals the violent ruptures and creative possibilities of this historical conjuncture. Drawing on Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Queer and Trans Studies, the panelists trace the ways soundscapes index imperial collapse, environmental devastation, and racialized exploitation, while also offering resources for imagining decolonial futures.
Our first paper locates the beginnings of the end of U.S. empire in the dismantling of the welfare state. The rapper KRS-One traces the tensions of this abandonment through songs like “My Philosophy,” “Illegal Business,” and “Stop the Violence” on the 1988 Boogie Down Productions album By All Means Necessary as well as the collaborative charity single “Self Destruction.” Placing KRS-One’s music in conversation with Hortense Spillers and Katherine McKittrick reveals how the rapper’s cultural production maps the already fracturing underside of the American Empire.
Our second paper explores the commercialization of lipsyncing in the pop music industry. While lipsyncing originated in gay nightclubs of the ‘60s and ‘70s with transsexual striptease, the commercial use of lipsyncing emerged as a novel technique for music executives to substitute the faces of Black musicians with imitators, often white, who were deemed as more marketable–exemplified infamously with the likes of Milli Vanilli. This paper considers the case of Black Box, an Italian house music band from the 1980s, which stole the vocal demos of Martha Wash–noted singer from The Weather Girls and Two Tons of Fun–and sold them as the vocal stylings of French fashion model, Katrin Quinol, who headlined as the band’s lead singer for their debut album, Dreamland. The ensuing crisis of representation that lipsyncing enabled serves as the basis for exploring the ongoing deracination of African American music genres in popular music as well as the appropriation of lipsync performance for commercial use.
Our third paper examines the nuclear silences imposed on Diné lands, centering Klee Benally’s work and the activism of Diné No Nukes to argue for a politics of interruption that transforms silence into noise and noise into resistance. Benally, a lifelong anarchist-activist, dedicated his work to resisting nuclear colonialism on the Navajo Nation. This paper honors Benally and the collective efforts of Diné No Nukes by attending to their calls for justice and, more specifically, by listening for the nuclear silences—and the systemic silencing—they fought against. Drawing on the dosimeter’s noise, a technology that renders invisible radiation audible and quantifiable, this paper advocates for a similar transformation: turning nuclear silences into noise poetics (Zwintscher 2019). This act of turning silence into noise interrogates the phenomenology of sound, challenging our perceptions of environmental and relational harm.
Together, these papers sound the end of empire, not as a singular event but as a layered, contested process marked by environmental catastrophe, racial capitalism, and Indigenous erasure. By attending to the sonic dimensions of these struggles, the panel invites us to rethink American Studies from the “sacrifice zones” (Juskus 2023) of empire. In doing so, the panel amplifies silenced histories, imagines decolonial futures, and asks how sound might help us navigate the violent eruptions and creative possibilities of this late imperial moment.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• By All Means Necessary: KRS-One and the Underside of the American Empire - Jonathan W Gray, CUNY Graduate Center

• Impersonating Dreamland: Black Box and the Commercialization of Lipsyncing in the Empire of Recorded Sound - eva pensis, University of Pennsylvania

• From Silence to Noise: Resisting Nuclear Colonialism with Klee Benally and Diné No Nukes - Anna B Gatdula, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Chair

• Michael R Casiano, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Biographical Information

Jonathan W. Gray is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College-CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center's programs in English and Biography and Memoir. Prof. Gray's research focuses on the literature and popular cultures of the post-WWII period, with a particular focus on the role that race plays in the construction of civic belonging. Gray is the author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination and the co-editor of the essay collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels. Prof. Gray wrote the entry "Race" for Keywords for Comics Studies and is working on a book project--Illustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics--which traces depictions of African Americans in comics from 1966 to the present and another exploring how Black the work of a cohort of artists, writers and musicians resisted the claims of the Reagan Revolution. Prof. Gray contributes to The New Republic, and has written in the past for Film Quarterly, Entertainment Weekly, Medium, and Salon.com.

Dr. Eva Pensis is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar whose work explores the contours and legacies of trans femme life and art within popular culture, nightlife economies, entertainment and performance industries. Her current book project approaches a performance history of lipsyncing (the record act) within queer nightlife by way of unearthing and attending to a counterhistory of transmisogyny and erotophobia within gay drag scenes and queer studies as a disciplinary formation. Two central claims that animate this book project involve the deidealization of queer nightlife (routinely deployed as a utopian space for trans life and performance “beyond” the conscription of everyday violence) as well as a commitment to studying the convergence of queer studies, queer of color critique, and feminist studies in attempting to form a politics around sex that deemphasized its economic labor market conditions (sex work)–conditions that are unevenly shared among marginalized women of cis and trans experience within the erotic industries. Her writing has been featured in e-Flux, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ruckus, SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. As a nightlife organizer and performer, Eva co-founded a trans equity arts alliance that featured an all-trans cast that raised funds for mutual aid for trans artist-performers of color and the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center. Eva is a pole instructor, artist, pianist, and community archivist. She holds a PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) and in Theater and Performance Studies from the University of Chicago as well as a BM in Piano Performance from University of Southern California. She is currently the postdoctoral fellow with the Trans Oral History Project at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anna B. Gatdula is a classically-trained singer and scholar whose research triangulates aesthetic theory, cultural history, and science and technology studies. Her current book project traces the cultural history of the atomic bomb in mediations of “spectacle,” including film, television, video game, and opera. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on opera across media, music in the atomic age, and theories of the spectacle. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2023. She continues creative collaborations with voice, poetry, and performance.