On the Threshold of the Political

Abstract

Protests erupted throughout Iran in 2009 after incumbent Mahmood Ahmadinejad was declared winner of a highly disputed presidential race. The so-called “Green Wave” of protest included violent clashes with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the jailing of protesters and journalists, as well as injuries and casualties. Few foreign journalists were granted visas to enter the country, resulting in an information vacuum filled by so-called “citizen journalists” who uploaded cell-phone videos of and tweeted about the violent clashes. Alongside this emerged video chronicles of nightly chants by residents of Iran's densely populated cities shouting “Allah-O-Akbar” from their rooftops. By tracing the roots of this protest tradition, not only in the Iranian revolution of 1979 but also in Shi'a rowzeh khani performance, this essay examines rooftop chanting as an enactment of a counter-politics through sonic performativity. The threshold space of the rooftop figures here as a space of political improvisation.

A possible perfection

“…In private, my interlocutors who were both critical of the Republican government and not religious were derisive of the discourse of perfection, its exemplary forms, and the salavāt . Elsewhere in the country, in places—like Tehran—where Republican ideology was more strongly contested (Kheshti, 2015; Khosravi, 2008; Mahdavi, 2009; Varzi, 2006), the salavāt was sometimes even publicly disputed, particularly by liberal student audiences or alternative activities like clapping, an activity that has historically been maligned by the clerical elites.…”

“…But their existence as known quantities in this landscape meant that they had the kind of "clarity" that Schielke (2015a, p. 63) disputes. Their amplification by the Islamic Republic also gave them authority and ensured that there were few individuals in Mashhadi society at scale who were not broadly aware of these exemplary forms and, to borrow from Roshanak Kheshti (2015), "attuned" to a landscape punctuated by them, to the possibility of perfection. Unpacking the entanglements between these exemplars, the Republican milieu, and the public that the salavāt produced is the aim of the rest of this article.…”

COVID-19 and sonic governmentality: Can we hear the virus speak?

“…25 Calling the chants of dissent on rooftops in Iran in 2009 'sonic performative', Roshanak Kheshti analyses how this collective act transformed the nation. 26 Kheshti's work, in turn, draws on the notion of the 'ethical landscape' posited by Charles Hirschkind in his classic study of cassette-sermon listeners in Egypt in the mid-1990s. Hirschkind's study demonstrates how this collective sonic performance forms an Islamic soundscape, enacting Islamic counter-publics and counter-politics.…”

Mourning the Nightingale’s Song: The Audibility of Networked Performances in Protests and Funerals of the Arab Revolutions

“…Ritual sonic objects at Syrian funerals also include nonvocal sounds, such as gunshots or the revving of motorcycle engines, that prostheticize the mourners' aural presence. This sonic "repertoire of contention" (Tufekci 2017, 89) is at once local and prescient to the political demands and emotions of the processional event and intersecting with broader geographies and longer histories of protests, whose repertoires are, as those working in sound studies have demonstrated, intertextual, subversive, and visceral (Kheshti 2015;Kunreuther 2018;Manabe 2015;Tausig 2019).…”

“…At the Occupy Baluwatar protests in Nepal, political subjectivity forms through āwāj (voice)-a political allegory for democracy and an audible vocalization, sound, or noise that generates political presence (Kunreuther 2018). The "Human Mic" tactic deployed at Occupy Wall Street protests and rooftop chanting in Iran during the Green Revolution (Kheshti 2015), respectively, demonstrate the efficacy of vocal techniques to reclaim space from the state. While activists often aim to disrupt and occupy space through the production of sound, Ben Tausig (2019) insists that sounds of protest are rarely "unbounded" in either their allegorical or physical travel through political space; rather, the politics of sound are often "constrained" by geographical and social structures.…”