This article narrates anticolonial antiphonies: an ongoing praxis of political reverberation and relay, a shuttling of strategies that carry across time, space, and language, connecting decolonial movements across histories and geographies. Antiphony inserts discord and dissonance into colonial orders, seeking to bring other worlds into being, and the article hears how sound carries movements that defy colonial cartographies and classifications, bringing together places and struggles that are often understood separately. It does so by combining the authors’ work on anticolonial histories, afterlives, and futures in Cairo, Egypt, and in Athens, Greece, in the process hearing the Mediterranean — particularly the Eastern Mediterranean — as a space that holds multiple imaginations of decolonization and futurity. The article tells four stories, moving antiphonally between these two cities, listening to (1) revolutionary and counterrevolutionary soundscapes, (2) “beatmapping” practices that connect migration and mobilization, (3) broadcast voices that affectively disseminated anticolonial resistance, and (4) the insurgent geographies created by sonic uprising. In so doing, it articulates a sonic third worldism that connects these movements and stories and places the sonic expressions foregrounded in the article into a much bigger political history. Anticolonial antiphony and sonic third worldism, though muffled and always under threat, continue to reach out toward decolonial futures — across the Mediterranean and as far as they can carry.

This chapter maps out a set of anticolonial media poetics, politics, and aesthetics. It centres on a series of collaborative radio programmes produced in Athens, Greece, as part of ongoing work with an activist collective in the city. The chapter works with ideas of rhythm, relay, and relation – which serve both as methods and as guiding concepts – and narrates a form of citizen soundwork: sonic practices that experiment with geographical, political, and technological imaginations. This work in Athens is a convergence and continuation of media activisms elsewhere, carrying collective methods of voicing and articulating belonging across migratory contexts. And it sounds out anticolonial media activisms that feed back across histories and geographies of resistance and liberation. These media activisms unmake colonial hierarchies of voice and knowledge; and make anticolonial publics, communicating across radical sonic cartographies and building political cultures that contest the colonialities of borders and citizenship regimes.

This essay remaps geographies of belonging in Athens. It thinks the city in circles and circulations, writing an anticolonial Athens made out of nonlinear geographies and histories, anti-border struggles, anticolonial pasts and futures, migrations and mobilisations. The essay writes three circular movements: narrating how Athens is part of a Mediterranean feedback loop in which struggles are in constant circulation; thinking a circular square in the middle of the city as a polis not dictated by ideas of ethnos; and following the ways that people make new choreographies of belonging in the dance circle, finding footwork out of step with the restrictive rhythms of the nation. These movements are forms of spatial resistance, and the essay closes by sharing some methods of movement writing. Through these circular movements, the essay seeks to map ways out of the linear geographies and histories of empire, and the ongoing colonialities of citizenship.

This article puts sound at the center of migration. Auditory cultures develop in displacement, while sounds are enrolled in regimes of citizenship, playing a key—but unheard—role in debates about freedom of movement. These ideas are presented through research in Athens, Greece, where people assert sonic belonging in the face of denied asylum, racialized persecution, and EU border politics that play out in urban space. I argue for listening with displacement. Such practices can amplify the creativities of people crossing borders, disrupt normative narratives that present migration as a problem, and challenge representational practices that reify ideas of “refugee crisis.” Migration is a sonic process. Sounds are always moving, and can help us rethink society itself through movement.

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This introduction sounds a call for ethnomusicologies of radio. Radio remains amongst the most widespread electronic mediums on earth. The tensions that accompanied its development continue to populate our present media landscapes, and many of these same tensions animate ethnomusicological endeavour. Here, we develop two central arguments. First, histories of radio and ethnomusicology are bound up together: that ethnomusicology is radiophonic and radio is ethnomusicological. Second, that radio is a vector of modernity that means different things in different times and places. Through these multiplicities, radio is less a thing or an apparatus than it is an ethnographic site. We begin by listening to the modernities that radio makes audible, before turning to the kinds of citizenship that are constructed through radio broadcasting. We close by sketching the disciplinary formations, theoretical concerns and ethnographic orientations that ethnomusicologies of radio might entail; and by introducing the articles that sound out these ideas and comprise this special issue.

The rise to prominence of sound studies—described by Michele Hilmes as an ‘“emerging field” for the last hundred years’ (2005: 249)—has provoked mixed responses among ethnomusicologists and sonic a...

At the close of World War II, the BBC Director General called for radio that was ‘firmly British in character’. This article tells two stories about how sound was used to produce the nation in the post-war moment. The first story is one of radio fieldwork, listening to how recording technology was used to recover fragments of the nation through the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952–1957). The second story tells of institutional efforts to combat interference through international technical regimes and emphasis on fidelity in transmission. Both tell the same story of how sound was nationalized and nationalizing, constructing a nation free from interference. I frame this as a process of securing the aural border. By tracing and connecting these labours and materialities, this aural history probes how sounds are used to index nations, how listening is conditioned as a national activity, and what gets silenced in the process. Acts of securing the aural border sat at the intersection of cold war techno-politics, international frequency plans, anxieties about mass culture, and post-war multiculturalism. National purification limited representational space at a time of great demographic change, imbuing the nation with particular assumptions about class and race. This article concludes by questioning the politics of wavelengths and technologies, critiquing ways in which national identity has been institutionalized in sound, and thus challenging discourses of national culture.

AbstractThis article responds to Alan Lomax's pronouncement that the mid-twentieth century constituted ‘the age of the golden ear’, when ‘a passionate aural curiosity overshadowed the ability to create music’. It examines a project born out of Lomax's own aural curiosity and his foregrounding of recording technology – theColumbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music(1955) – using it to sound out the history of mid-century ethnographic field recording. By retracing the production of theWorld Library, this article explores the various agencies compressed into the audible exteriors of field recordings, as they were produced by and for specific technologies and formats, circulated through international networks, and as they became part of the aural public sphere of post-war Europe. It concludes by considering some of the implications of this sonic labour as field recordings find their way into new, digital, listening environments.