Sound Carries Techniques for Hearing Space and Politics

This article introduces the special issue of Social Text titled “Sound Carries,” which hears how sound carries across geographies, histories, and disciplines—carries meanings, struggles, and creative ways of being and knowing. The editors of this special issue stress that, both politically and poetically, sound and space cannot easily be parsed, and they argue for the value of thinking sound and space together in order to make sense of the worlds that people make together. The article begins by locating the intellectual work of this special issue in London—a London intractably positioned as postimperial metropolis, a city animated by ongoing colonialities, anticolonial echoes, and postcolonial potentials. It then outlines some thoughts around cartographies that echo, before tuning in to some of the specific frequencies that constitute forms of world making and presencing in the diasporic city. Next, this introduction frames the city as a “mixing desk” in order to foreground the political and spatial potential of thinking the city through sound. Finally, it outlines the multidisciplinary methodologies and approaches that comprise this special issue. In toto, the article gestures to an emergent, and interdisciplinary, field of decolonial sound studies.