![]() In Japan, heavy policing renders protests less visible, compelling Japanese protesters to use sound to make their claims known chanting, recognized as important in building solidarity, is often led and planned. The Women’s March in New York was privileged by light policing it didn’t need sound to be seen. The leaderless atmosphere of the Women’s Marches led to a high rate of innovation in chanting. Drawing from ethnography and videos of thirty protests, the essay analyzes the chants of the first six months of the Resistance. Using a combination of humor, references to recent events, interaction with popular music, and intertextuality with historical protest culture, these chants and songs engage protesters and issues in memorable fashion. Aiding the construction of these new chants is their tendency to follow the familiar musical forms of sentences or periods, and their frequent use of pre-existing text patterns. The essay ends with a critique of the decline in intersectionality seen in the 2018 Women’s March in New York and a call for agonistic democracy. My experience in the Women’s March differs from my colleagues in this forum: I participated in the Women’s March in New York, rather than in Washington, DC. My decision was partly pragmatic: for the past several years, I have been conducting ethnography on sound in Japanese social movements, centering on Tokyo, where the densely packed, tall glass buildings in Shibuya, a neighborhood favored by protesters, resembles the urban landscape of Fifth Avenue on the other hand, Washington’s urban layout, with its monumental scale and lower density, has little in common with Tokyo. While I had participated in many marches in Japan, as of January 2017, I had only attended a few antinuclear marches in the US. I wanted to make comparisons of protest sounds given similar urban settings. I was hence struck by how different the sounds of the Women’s March were from those of protests in Tokyo. These sounds, in turn, impacted my affective response. ![]() I subsequently attended several other marches and rallies of the Resistance-a concatenation of actions to oppose Trump and his policies-in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, including the March for Science, March for Truth, March for Our Lives, and the Women’s March of 2018, and observed over two dozen other Resistance protests on the internet, both live and in playback. This article explores the sounds of the Women’s March in New York and the many protests that followed. I consider the march as both a single event and the opening salvo of the Resistance. As David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow note, the United States is “in the middle of a major cycle of contention.” First, I continue the conversation about policing started by Shayna Silverstein to compare the ways in which the police control the use of public space in Japan and the US, and the impact that these differences have on protest sounds. By police, I consider Rancière’s sense of “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task,” i.e., all the structures and logics of society that keep everyone in their places. I pay special attention to the actions of the uniformed police force in public spaces. As occupations such as Tahrir Square, Occupy Wall Street, and Euromaidan have shown, urban space is increasingly the forum in which the people who have no voice-the “part of those who have no part” -can emerge as a single subject, composed of equals. ![]() When the uniformed police keep order in these public spaces, they act in ways that reflect the underlying beliefs of the hegemonic police, as broadly defined by Rancière. ![]() As protesters commonly chant and sing, I focus on these sounds, for the act of raising one’s voice is a visceral experience, “a metaphor for political participation.” Chanting and singing are participatory music, as Thomas Turino has defined, which forces us to listen to each other and promotes bonding. I analyze the musical and textual characteristics that make the chants memorable and the processes by which chants are created.
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