sound and south From at least the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Western thought has associated sound with "South." Rousseau averred that the origin of language in warmer, southern climes was connected to music and the natu ral inflections of the voice. The frigid harshness of the North, he argued, allowed for no such melodiousness of speech: there, communication resulted in lifeless words. Sound, body, and presence on the one hand; arid speech-in close proximity to the "dead letter" of writing-on the other. 1 To be sure, Rousseau's notion of sound is very diff er ent from our own, just as his Mediterranean South is not equivalent to the so-called global South of the twenty-first century. And yet one cannot help but notice an uncanny historical continuity: sound and South run like intertwined red threads through modernity, like a double-helix dna constituting our underground makeup. Ever since Rousseau, the South has been associated with sound, music, body, presence, nature, and warmth. The North, by contrast, sees itself as dominated by writing and vision-by a cultural coldness born of the snowcapped peaks of the Alps. 2 For Rousseau, as for us, sound was at once an empirical phenomenon and a concept burdened with tremendous po liti cal weight. The same, of course, can be said of "the South," a term that continues to designate a (loose and vague) geo graph i cal location while si mul ta neously harboring multiple ideological connotations with little empirical relation to geography and space. Sound and the South are, importantly, relational figures: they function only
