Keynote Address for Auditory Cultures of World Socialism Symposium

Festivals of international friendship with their eroticized and racialized soundscapes, bootleg recordings of music from abroad, oral histories and testimonies—these are canonic sites for socialist worldmaking through sound, familiar vehicles for articulating or contesting visions of global collectivity. Yet they all cast listening and sound as vectors of thinking big. In this talk, I turn to the sound archives of world socialism with an ear for the intimate, small-scale, and particular. How can we attune ourselves to the global inequalities, insurgencies of class politics, and moments of transnational (im)mobility that complicate the media narratives inherited from the Cold War? Drawing on anthropologist Marina Peterson’s “glitch methodology” for the study of audio recording, I suggest modes for thinking of literal broken records, erased tapes, and quiet in the archive as constitutive elements of world socialisms’ sonic commons.

An associate professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Andrea Bohlman studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Much of Bohlman’s work builds on her expertise in music in East Central Europe, cultures of protest, and everyday histories of sound recording. Her 2020 monograph, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland, grows out of a decade of research on the work of sound and music for the opposition to state socialism in Poland. Bohlman is currently writing a book, provisionally titled Rewind: Tape Recording, Sound Knowledge, and the Threads of History, 2020–1936, that is in many senses a backwards history of tape recording. The book unspools a constellation of tape archives to query histories of unstable listening.