Voicing Resistance: Black Women, Sound, and the Politics of Hearing in Postcolonial Lisbon

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1) Blackness, Community, and Resistance

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of voicescapes to analyse how colonial sensory hierarchies persist in contemporary urban Europe. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black women activists from Brazil and Lusophone Africa in Lisbon, we argue that Portuguese colonialism produced a distinctive sensory regime in which intimacy and proximity masked violence while regulating who could be seen, heard, and recognised as fully human. While much scholarship has focused on the colonial gaze, this paper shifts attention to the politics of audibility. In postcolonial Lisbon, racialised subjects are paradoxically hyper-audible yet structurally unheard. Their accents, tonalities, and expressive styles are marked as excessive, emotional, or disruptive, while their political claims are neutralised or silenced within institutional spaces. Through participant observation, interviews, and analysis of spoken word performances, activist gatherings, and public interventions, we examine how racialised women strategically mobilise voice, sound, and silence to contest racialised marginalisation.
The paper advances three arguments. First, colonial power operated not only through visual classification but also through acoustic ordering. Second, racial inequality today is sustained through differential regimes of listening that regulate legitimacy and credibility. Third, reclaiming voice constitutes a form of sensory resistance that reconfigures the “distribution of the sensible” in the postcolony. By foregrounding sound as a sociological object, the paper contributes to debates in racial capitalism, feminist theory, and postcolonial sociology, demonstrating that struggles over inequality are also struggles over whose voices count as political speech.

Authors

• Sofia Aboim

• Filipe Carreira da Silva, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge