Affect was an essential component of the Arab uprisings, and it remains an important medium for shaping everyday politics in the Middle East and beyond. Yet while affect is beginning to be conceived as integral to studies of social movements, endeavors to control individual and collective affect in the praxis of statecraft remain understudied—despite robust evidence that affect and emotion are intimately entwined with political behavior and decision-making on a wide range of issues spanning voter preference to foreign policy. This article examines how such control takes effect, situating the sensory body as a bridge and key site of interaction and contestation for diverse projects that seek to influence behavioral outcomes via the manipulation of public space. From among the bodily senses, it singles out the auditory realm as a particularly potent generator of affect and examines the entanglement of sound, hearing, and power to foreground ways the sensory body is routinely engaged in state projects. Drawing on examples from the protests that ricocheted across the Middle East from 2010–2012, and framing these with historical antecedents from original archival work, this article bridges phenomenological experience and political outcomes to reveal how sensory inputs such as sound, wielded by elite and subaltern actors alike, are engineered for political effect. In so doing, I argue that a necessary prerequisite for grasping the role of affect and emotion in politics is a better understanding of technologies and modalities of control that go into the structuring of the sensory environment.

Sound represents a salient yet rarely examined counterpoint to visuality and materiality in security, international bordering, and mobility literature. Using the context of sub-Saharan African migration as grounding for empirical analysis and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Morocco in 2015 and 2016, this article lays the foundation for a research agenda that understands voice, and the sonic body more broadly, as mechanisms of political power. In examining the central roles that sound, hearing, and voice play in strategies of individual resistance at border crossings, as well as in state, private, and transnational communication and surveillance regimes, it attends to the ways in which sound and the audialized body reconfigure power relations, and structure mobility and personal identity. This analysis contributes to the growing literature addressing biometric borders and the deterritorialization of security practices, and argues that sound, along with more familiar nodes of securitization, constitutes a critical site of governmentality and therefore of ethical and moral negotiation.

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Public “common sense” should be conceptualized as an important force structuring the politics of belonging. Homing in on the embodied and sensory aspects of common, taken-for-granted knowledge and the habits of perception that inform it, this article demonstrates how culturally entrained listening practices structure rights to the city and the exercise of citizenship. By tuning into the significance of ambient religious sound, it offers an empirical, ethnographic investigation into how common sense, in dialogue with constitutional and municipal law, shapes practices of citizenship and participation in French public space. The article argues that common sense deriving from perception and interpretation of public sound among majority French represents a stubborn obstacle to French Muslims’ exercise of full citizenship; indeed, it enacts a kind of violence that locks French Muslims out of agentive citizenry, rendering them objects to be muted at will, not fellow citizens to be heard.

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