THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING TO BLACK CANADA(S)

This dissertation, Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s) develops the concept, Black Nowheres, and its two registers—now here and know here—to understand how the pervasive conditions of anti-Blackness structure the world and can be registered in everyday sound and sonic practices. I employ a range of unsettled listening practices to sonically think and grapple with the dynamics of Black being and Blackness in Canada—particularly how Black people are treated by the Canadian Nation State—given the Nation’s complex relationship to Blackness and Black people. This dissertation also registers how, in spite of the violence that establishes Black nowheres, Black people assert generative sonic practices that insist on knowing Black life on different terms. This dissertation is thematically organized by key tropes that are persistent in both Black Studies and Sound Studies: Noise, Voice, and Soundscape. While these tropes thematically organize the chapters/tracks of the dissertation, I engage in practices of thinking about—as well as thinking with and through—Black sonic practices to register the nuances of Black sociality in Canada. As such, each chapter registers the nuanced dynamics of what I name Black nowheres to understand how Black life “is constituted through vulnerability to the overwhelming force of anti-blackness and white supremacy, and yet not capitulating to only [sic] be known by these same forces […]” (Campt, 2017, p. 23). In shifting the focus from fixed readings of sounds and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada to listening to what sounds, and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada, do, this dissertation shifts our relation from one of total mastery and legibility of Black Canada(s) to insisting we unfold and reveal the intricacies of Black being and Blackness in Canada without limit.