Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces
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Graduate group
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Hong Kong
Intermediality
Protest Music
Public Space
Sound Studies
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Abstract
Written in the mist of Hong Kong’s silencing, this dissertation project is an interdisciplinary and intermedial study and archive of the dynamism of sound and sound of what I call “agentive sonic matters” in the city’s urban spaces where protests appeared and now have disappeared. The work focuses on the biopolitics of sound and muted sound in Hong Kong protest and everyday spaces during and after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests (Anti-ELAB Protests) in 2019 and 2020. Taking on intermediality, the project weaves sensory experience with the interplay of materials and media to create an experiential and “multilayered archive,” one that registers events (sounds and muted sounds, interviews, images) that would otherwise be lost. I have composed, via this assembled archive, intermedial spaces in and through which readers/listeners/participants can experience the events. The intermedial spaces include an extended reality virtual tour, a sound art installation, an ethnographic documentary, and written prose. Threading together these forms of medial historicization is a theoretical analysis of “political aurality” and how it emerges in situations of extreme state aggression and repression; I identify in the sonic a central dimension of politics. Together, the multimodal work and prose chapters create affective spheres as a fundamental historical domain. As engaged scholarship, “Sounding Freedom” generates an archive of and for this Hong Kong generation’s defining event.