Sounding the Past

InThis issue brings together essays that are concerned with history, law, and archives.The threads running through the essays allude to the preparation of evidence that is not only textual and visual but also sonic and affective to serve both the narration of historic events and legal argument.The issue opens with Nomi Dave's essay, "Listening to White Supremacy on Trial," exploring the consequences of the Open Justice movement that allowed remote public access to judicial proceedings though audio livestreaming.The essay focuses on the Sines v. Kessler trial brought by a group of plaintiffs affected by the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.The defendants in the trial included several individuals and groups advocating right-wing, white supremacist ideologies who were being tried collectively, although they were not a unified group.The trial presented various opportunities for these hate groups to reiterate their positions performatively and to amplify their positions to remote audiences.Conversely, it also presented opportunities for the plaintiffs to air their grievances and bring attention to the harm and injury caused by hate groups.Akin to other significant public trials like the Adolf Eichmann trial and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the trial raises questions about collective healing and whether open justice leads to catharsis or reveals unbridgeable gaps.Dave's article, focusing on the sonic technologies involved in broadcasting, allows readers to consider the processes by which publics are cultivated and produced as recipients and arbiters of difficult truths.While audio technologies seek to make these juridical proceedings available as transparently as possible, Dave shows how, once sound leaves its source, it is difficult to control its trajectory and the publics that it might produce.Turning Foucauldian ideas of the invisibility of the operation of modern power and punishment on their head, Dave suggests that audio technologies seek to make these operations transparent and public while rendering the listening publics invisible and inscrutable.While these technologies impose certain ideas of transparency and fidelity, it is difficult to control listening.