Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession, and the (re)making of Anglo‐European nature

Abstract

Creative and feminist geographers position listening as a way to build more responsive, ethical, and reciprocal relations to people and environments. In this paper I argue that for geographers to situate listening – in the broadest definition as ‘sensing, attuning, and noticing’ – as part of a creative approach to reparative practice, we must first understand how Anglo‐European modes of listening and interpreting the world through sound are shaped by ‘sonic colonialities’. These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre‐colonial natures, imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable. Given the now prolific interest of geographers in sonic practices, this paper argues for a closer and more critical attention to how listening and sound methods are inherently determined by sonic colonialities. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practices create and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporary ecological sound art.

Listening otherwise: From “silent tourism” soundscapes to privileged sonic ways of knowing

“…Several pieces conflate “wilderness spaces” and “national parks,” reducing local specificities to a universal space. Morber (2020) explains that protecting “quiet in wilderness spaces” is the reason why national parks exist: A gross oversimplification that flattens the United States into a seamless national history with congruent ways of knowing and understanding nature and sound and erasing or obfuscating colonial dispossession and a diversity of human and more-than-human listening histories and co-habitations within an homogeneous “virginal” entity so-called “the wilderness” (Kanngieser, 2023; Vannini and Vannini, 2020).…”

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…Sonic digital mediation of non-human lifeworlds is the focus of recent geographic scholarship that considers dynamic relations between societies and environments in Transactions. Kanngieser (2023), for example, argues that using experimental sound methods when investigating non-human worlds has the potential to unearth enduring (but often overlooked) sonic colonial practices. In a very different lifeworld setting, but with a similar focus on mediated morethan-human and human relations, Searle et al (2023) consider the possibilities that come from unpacking the urban conviviality generated by the 'digital peregrine'.…”

Geography and ethics II: Justification and the ethics of anti-oppression

“…As Bakker (2022) argues, however, digital connections should be placed in broader social and historical contexts, such as by situating new listening technologies that track other species and processes with respect to how knowledge of others is witnessed through sounds that are not mere data, but a call to kinship (cf. Kanngieser 2023). Here, getting to grips with how moral warrant shifts in nonstandard ways is key to thinking across the alliances that anchor ethics of anti-oppression – ways that also need to consider how other species complicate co-existence in ethically important ways (Wilson 2022).…”