Full Description
In this book, over 40 contributors collectively tune in to how sound—and its absence—can function as a source of power that enables isolation, control and harm, as well as connection, healing and resistance.
Sound and Detention explores soundscapes in places, processes and systems of confinement in order to better understand experiences of imprisonment and to imagine alternatives to the carceral state. Bringing together over 40 contributors from five continents, the book tunes in to some of the manifold effects associated with the presence and absence of sound and music in prisons and places of detention: from isolation, harm and control, to connection, healing and resistance.
Scholarly texts feature alongside poetry, dialogue, memoir and experimental creative writing, as well as a diverse collection of audio productions on the book's accompanying website. This plurality of form mediates the voices of artists, activists, thinkers and practitioners - some themselves currently or formerly incarcerated. Through deep engagement with the sonic realm and with questions of power, the contributors explore what it might mean to listen nearby - making space to hold distinct perspectives and positionalities in respectful simultaneity - while also amplifying resonances between sound, listening and broader questions of epistemic and social justice.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Listening Nearby
Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Kate Herrity and Áine Mangaoang
Section 1: Transcending the walls: Sound, music and agency during and beyond captivity
1. Ear Training for Incarceration: Carceral Acoustemology within the Contemporary Jail
Benjamin Harbert, Joel Castón and Michael Woody
2. Emotional Overdubbing: listening passports to sonic agency in the Fens Unit, HMP Whitemoor
Kate Herrity and Justin Wiggan
3. Bhaichara Radio: The sound of hope in a juvenile remand facility in Delhi
Rijul Kataria, Puneeta Roy, and Bhanu Mehta
4. On Phil Collins's (2020) Bring Down the Walls
Phil Crockett Thomas
5. A book group in prison: Talking about books, talking about ourselves
Kirstin Anderson
Section 2: Sounding Stories: Musical narratives in carceral spaces
6. A Choir's Journey: Belonging in a prison setting
InHouse Harmony
7. Mercy Sown, Mercy Reaped: Traveling Over and Under Prison Wires to Build Solidarity through Collaborative Songwriting
Mary L. Cohen, Naomi Davis, Michael Blackwell, and Anthony Rhodd
8. Singing as Commoning
Anna Papaeti
9. Clandestine Musical Practices in the Women's Prisons of Early Francoism
Lara Quicler Moriarty and Cristina Palomares Toledano
10. The Art of Choosing / The Choosing of Art
Sayati Das
Section 3: 'An Ecology of Fear': sound, torture and panacoustic surveillance in places of detention
11. Years in Segregation
Alim Braxton and Mark Katz
12. From Shrapnel of Memory, A Liberated Time-Space Can Be Conjured. Parallel Time-Spaces of Detention and Freedom
Christina Hazboun
13. Us, Interrupted: Enduring the wounds of carceral communication
Emilie Amrein and André De Quadros
14. The Silence of the Mandela Rules
M.J. Grant and James E.K. Parker
Section 4: Bordering notations: sonic technologies and postcolonial penalities
15. Mediterradio: An interlude on four wavelengths
Tom Western
16. My Story, Your Story: Towards Decolonial Digital Storytelling Methods
Keith Nyende, Josué Aganze Musoda, Atuhairwe Leocadious and Erin Cory
17. where are you today
André Dao
18. PFFT Ensemble: chaos and commoning in the Scottish Highlands
Hector MacInnes
Section 5: Moving to stand still: charting movement and migration through music and sound
19. Poetics of Music and Exile in Postliberation Eritrea
Tesfalem Habte Yemane, Habtat Zerezghi and Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes
20. Listening After, Listening Otherwise: Sonic Pathways Through Forced (Im)Mobilities and Life in Legal Limbo
Chrysi Kyratsou and Fiona Murphy
21. The Kids of Klinikstraße 6: Mediating Isolation and Resistance Through Sound and Music among Young Syrian Refugees in Germany
Guilnard Moufarrej
22. Between Here and There: Sounds of Asylum
Ailbhe Kenny
Index
