Andrew Brooks (University of Massachusetts - Amherst)
azbr@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
This panel invites papers that explore how sound functions as a medium of memory, historical re-entry, and speculative method across literature, music, and performance. Sound often exceeds archival containment—it echoes, distorts, and returns. Through rhythm, resonance, repetition, and noise, artists and writers construct sonic palimpsests: layered fields where the past is never entirely erased, and where listening becomes a mode of critical and temporal engagement.
We are especially interested in work that theorizes sonic forms—musical, textual, performative, or recorded—as methods of confronting erasure, reckoning with the past, and imagining otherwise. How do sonic aesthetics disrupt dominant historiographies? What kinds of temporalities emerge when listening is treated as an analytic? How do artists mobilize rhythm, echo, or vibration to register spectral histories, cultural survivals, or collective futures?
Papers might address sound in speculative fiction, music as historical method, rhythm and diasporic memory, sonic hauntings, or performance as temporal rupture. Submissions engaging Indigenous, Black, diasporic, or decolonial sonic practices are especially welcome, as are interdisciplinary approaches drawing from sound studies, media theory, performance theory, and literary criticism.
This panel seeks to foreground sound not only as content but as critical method: a means of reading across silence, time, and the thresholds of disappearance and return.