Literature on the Politics of Noise with Petal Samuel
April 28, 2021 | Tommie Watson
Literary Scholar and Assistant Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Petal Samuel sits down to discuss her current research project.
Transcript
Philip Hollingsworth:
Welcome to the Institute, a podcast on the lives and work of Fellows and friends of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Philip Hollingsworth. In this episode, I speak with Assistant Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, Petal Samuel. In our conversation, Professor Samuel discusses her current project on the literature of noise policing in post-colonial 20th-century Caribbean nations. All right, so Petal thanks so much for speaking with me today on the podcast. And so, to start off for the audience, can you talk a little bit about what you do here at UNC on campus as a professor?
Petal Samuel:
Sure. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Um, I am an Assistant Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at UNC here. And I teach classes on Caribbean literature, Black feminist thought, Black women’s writing. And my research is sort of broadly interested in — I’d say — Caribbean anti-colonial thought, politics, aesthetics, with a sort of specific emphasis on the contributions of Afro Caribbean women, writers and artists to the anti-colonial tradition.
PH:
Yeah, so one thing I’ve noticed about departments like yours, and there’s other departments that are like this too, like Women’s and Gender Studies or even Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department. Within a department, you have people that study various things, very inherently interdisciplinary. So, I guess a question I’ll ask you is what drew you to literary studies as opposed to you know, there’s others in your department that do history or political science or even anthropology. So.
PS:
In undergrad, I was a Africana studies and English double major. And I was always drawn to literature in particular for its capacity to capture lived and felt realities, as opposed to the kind of formal documentation of phenomena, which are also very important. But I think there was something that I felt that I could connect to on a deeper level when it came to literature and things that literature can capture: the sort of subtleties, the informal kind of ways that these kind of structures in our world shape our lives and that kind of muddiness and messiness of it all. So I was drawn to literature, for the ways that it was able to capture things that it didn’t feel like there was room for in some other areas of study.
PH:
I studied literature too, so I’m just always curious [laughs].
PS:
Oh, yeah. I’m very excited to be talking to another literary scholar.
PH:
Yeah, yeah. We can nerd out on certain things [laughs]. If you don’t mind, could you talk a little bit about your current book project and specifically, dive in a little bit on what you’re working on right now?
PS:
Sure, yeah. So my book project is examining the regulation and sort of suppression of noise as a technique of colonial governments in the Anglophone Caribbean, in the late colonial period and in the post-independence periods. So on the one hand, I’m interested in things like noise abatement laws, anti-noise public discourses and newspapers and so on, the kind of framing of noise as an issue of colonial governance, an urgent issue of colonial governance. And then, on the other hand, thinking about how Afro Caribbean women writers expose or call attention to the actual political stakes of noise control. So there’s a way that these official discourses about noise traffic is somewhat pedestrian and apolitical. They’re really objective matters of sensory disturbance. But you know, in fact, they become these mechanisms that facilitate all these forms of anti-Black and classist and sexist and homophobic violence and justify the presence or the hyper-policing of these communities in certain ways. And so what writers uniquely do, is sort of expose how these laws and these public discourses and just general ideas about sonic or acoustic respectability facilitate a Black kind of processes of Black dispossession and hyper policing and so on.
PH:
You know, it’s funny you say that, because recently, in our neighborhood, I’ve been working on this committee to like, review the HOA covenants. And there was one in there that kind of, and I think if I hadn’t been thinking about stuff, like your work or other things I’ve been reading over the past few years, there was this one thing about — it just said — it was some kind of — I don’t want to say it — it was just some line, it was almost just like two lines about, you know, not doing anything that would be considered obnoxious or annoying. And I’m like, how could you put that in an official document? And it’s been there for like over 20 years. And I’m like, this thing has got to go. Because like that could be anything. And then in like a space like this in Chapel Hill, that could be definitely used for like, you know, suppression of any, like, minority group that’s in this neighborhood or anything like that. And it just was wild to me.
PS:
Yeah. And that’s part of what I find with the sort of study of anti-noise rhetoric and legislation is that it is deliberately obfuscatory, you’re not quite sure at what point something becomes noise. And even if you know, even if there are kind of stipulated decibel measures or something, people aren’t walking around with sound meters, just kind of measuring decibels. You know what I mean? And so it really relies on the idea of, of nuisance, which gets treated as though it’s apolitical and so we all know, at what point something becomes a nuisance.
PH:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So can you give some, like a specific example of like a writer? What kind of, how that manifests in a particular writer?
PS:
Yeah, sure.
PH:
And right before that, so is this more like, the time period? Does it cover a specific time period like 20th-century work?
PS:
I am focusing on the late colonial period. So the sort of, as early as the 1930s through to the contemporary moment.
PH:
Okay.
PS:
Mid to late 20th century, early 21st century. In terms of how this manifests or appears in the work of a particular writer. I’m currently kind of working on my chapter on Michelle Cliff’s work. Michelle Cliff is a queer Afro Jamaican woman writer who writes these two novels, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, which is the sequel to Abeng. And they’re tracing the life of this young Afro Jamaican girl growing up in 1950s Jamaica and in the sort of late colonial period on the eve of independence. So that’s what Abeng covered. No Telephone having covered her migration to the US, moving to London and then coming back to Jamaica in the 80s and after independence, and still kind of observing the endurance of colonial ideologies and forms in the aftermath of independence.
PH:
Yeah.
PS:
And one of the things that I, that drew me to Abeng is her attention to sonic policing as it takes place in these, via these informal agents of sonic surveillance. So she writes a lot about the colonial school. And she writes about, for instance, having to sing colonial anthems in school like Rule, Britannia! and how, you know, in her girl’s school they’re having to sing that collectively and loudly and the notes are, you know, in harmony. Right? And at the same time telling stories about how — there’s a scene in Abeng that I think about, in the chapter where one of her classmates who was a dark-skinned working-class Jamaican girl in her colonial school has an epileptic seizure in the middle of the collective singing of a hymn. And the nuns who are leading the hymn encourage the girls to kind of keep singing and sing louder to cover the sound of her body kind of thrashing against the ground. And then she’s kind of promptly expelled from the school after that. And so she captures some of the ways that sonic discipline was a very important part of her upbringing as an Afro Jamaican girl. And then how sonic discipline fell unevenly on particular people based on class, based on color. Right? Because Clare — the protagonist — is a light-skinned kind of Creole, from a Creole elite family in Jamaica. You know, and so she’s experiencing these mechanisms of kind of surveillance and discipline, but really quite differently from her classmate who is expected to really be much more contained and controlled and disciplined. So yeah, so that’s one example of how sound and sonic discipline, sonic respectability comes up.
PH:
Yeah, you know, for some reason, when I was thinking about this, I was always thinking about it being like — the idea of like sonic policing — to be a silencing thing. But this is an interesting example because it’s the opposite of that, but it’s controlling what comes out, you know. I guess, trying to imprint a certain ideology through that chorus or that choral singing or whatever.
PS:
Actually, while I was working on this chapter, I came across them writing about a recent public skirmish around the singing of Rule, Britannia! and I think it was for the 2020 Proms, this classical music concert in the UK. And the last day of the concert is reserved for kind of patriotic anthems and other kinds of things. Yeah. And Rule, Britannia! was one of the pieces that they wanted to play and BBC opted to not have, to not air the lyrics and not have a collective singing of the lyrics. Because the lyrics say, Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the wave. Britain’s never never never shall be slaves. And so BBC said, you know, let’s not sing the lyrics and then it became a whole, you know, there was a whole public contention around whether or not this is censorship of Britain’s, you know, cultural forms and etc, etc. So, these issues are continuing to kind of shape how we think about sound and the meaning of sound in the legacies of colonialism today, yeah.
PH:
Do you find any challenges writing about sound and noise in a written form? What challenges do you find there?
PS:
What helps me to do this, is that what is being called noise is already so subjective. It’s a discursive construction to begin with. And so, when I am looking at going through colonial archives and looking at these newspaper clippings and so on, the tale really is the metaphors and the sort of clustering of concerns around the issue of noise, the kinds of instruments that get routinely cited as the sources of noise, drums, horns, you know, the kinds of social spaces. So, really being, having a literary analysis, a close reading background is essential for this project. Because it, for other kinds of sound studies projects, you know, the kind of nature and the quality of the sound and its timbre, its volume, etc. those kinds of things. For other kinds of sound studies projects, it’s essential that you kind of sink within through the sound and that kind of way. For this project, I’m really interested in calling noise as a discursive construction into focus, really so that I can dismiss it or displace it as the actual name for the thing that they’re naming or problematizing.
PH:
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it’s more on the discourse of the noise rather than the noise itself.
PS:
Right.
PH:
So yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. I’ve got one more question. If that’s okay. And some we asked almost all our guests what’s a book that changed your life?
PS:
There’s so many. My life is constantly being changed by books. Can I talk about more than one?
PH:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine.
PS:
[laughs] Okay, so I’ll — there are two that come to mind immediately — one is a dissertation by a sort of a legendary sound studies dissertation, by a scholar named Mendi Obadike, called Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound. And it is just such an essential and beautiful, foundational Black sound studies text, that one talks about how essential an analysis of textual narrative is for understanding the meaning that sound carries. So one of the things that she talks about is the fact that sound is, the meaning of sound is not necessarily always carried within the sound itself. It’s kind of attached to these other discourses and other kinds of textual things. And then she kind of talks about the concept of acousmatic Blackness, which is how Blackness gets invoked in the visual absence of Black people. So if we think about the soundtrack for a film, what it means if hip hop is playing in the background-
PH:
Right, right.
PS:
even if no Black people are on screen, they’re trying to invoke a certain kind of environment of criminality, or underworldness, or whatever it is. And so that has been really important. And I’ve, I’m also currently feeling very inspired by the work of people like Shoniqua Roach and Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman and Sam Pinto and Kevin Quashie on the concept of Black privacy. And Quashie’s book, The Sovereignty of Quiet, really changed a lot for me in terms of the way that I think about the study of Blackness. Because he pushes against this idea that Blackness exists for its capacity to form its political meaningfulness to others, and is asking us to think about Black interiority. And what that means and what that looks like in a context in which Black people and Blackness is expected to be public and represent some sort of set of public lessons for the world. Even as traditions of Black resistance are critical and really important. How can we kind of think about Black people as full human beings who have interiority as well and aren’t just representing some subset of things to the world? So yeah, so that’s what, those are two sets of things that have really moved me and inspired me.
PH:
That’s great. Well, Petal. Thank you for that. And thanks so much for again for talking with me today.
PS:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
[music]
PH:
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