Abstract:
Between 2019 and 2021, Colombia’s Paro Nacional (National Strike) established sound and music as central instruments of political protest. This lecture examines two significant instances of this phenomenon: the viral 2019 Cacerolazo Nacional, in which banging pots and pans spread across the country as a spontaneous form of dissent, and the 2021 Cacerolazos Sinfónicos, in which orchestral musicians brought their instruments into public demonstrations. Reading mediated sources, including videos, WhatsApp communications, press coverage, and human rights reports, as situated representations rather than transparent evidence of lived experience, this analysis develops a theoretical framework that extends Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics from lethal exposure to what might be termed aural governance. This framework, theorized here as a necropolitics of silence, accounts for how states render certain voices, communities, and experiences inaudible as a means of fragmenting and managing populations. In response to this imposed silence, citizens mobilized practices of noising and musicking to form ephemeral sonic communities that contested state-imposed inaudibility and briefly redistributed the sensible, reclaiming urban space for democratic claim-making. However, insofar as these practices functioned as political tactics rather than as elements of a broader strategy engaged with institutional politics, they also left the collectives and individuals involved vulnerable to both state repression and eventual absorption into institutional frameworks. This ambiguity, at once generative and self-limiting, offers a productive lens through which to examine the transformative potential and the political constraints of sound as a medium of resistance.
Juan Fernando Velasquez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. He studies how sound, technology, and social life intersect across Latin America, bridging musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural history, and sound studies, with additional interests in brass bands, protest music, and ecomusicology. His first book, Los Ecos de la Villa (2011), received a Grant for Research on Cultural Heritage from Medellín’s Secretary of Culture, and his articles have appeared in Latin American Music Review and Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal. He is completing his second book, Inscribing Sounds, on music technology and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombia, under contract with Oxford University Press. Velasquez earned his BA and MA from Universidad EAFIT and his PhD in Musicology, with certificates in Latin American and Cultural Studies, from the University of Pittsburgh. His honors include a Michigan Society of Fellows fellowship, a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, a Thinker grant, and a Fulbright grant.