This article puts sound at the center of migration. Auditory cultures develop in displacement, while sounds are enrolled in regimes of citizenship, playing a key—but unheard—role in debates about freedom of movement. These ideas are presented through research in Athens, Greece, where people assert sonic belonging in the face of denied asylum, racialized persecution, and EU border politics that play out in urban space. I argue for listening with displacement. Such practices can amplify the creativities of people crossing borders, disrupt normative narratives that present migration as a problem, and challenge representational practices that reify ideas of “refugee crisis.” Migration is a sonic process. Sounds are always moving, and can help us rethink society itself through movement.
In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary, became prime minister, following the upheaval caused by the country's plebiscite to leave the European Union. One of the main strands of argument of the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign centred on the ‘deep public anxiety . . . about uncontrolled immigration’ and promised to reduce numbers of immigrants to the country. This desire to control the nation's borders continued to dominate the official soundscape of Britain's government. At the 2016 annual Tory conference, May endeavoured to draw clear lines on issues of belonging, territory, citizenship, and the fuzzy notion of British values, discursively excluding not only migrants, but also anyone with an international(ist) outlook from the national debate: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world’, she posited, ‘you are a citizen of nowhere.’
This chapter maps out a set of anticolonial media poetics, politics, and aesthetics. It centres on a series of collaborative radio programmes produced in Athens, Greece, as part of ongoing work with an activist collective in the city. The chapter works with ideas of rhythm, relay, and relation – which serve both as methods and as guiding concepts – and narrates a form of citizen soundwork: sonic practices that experiment with geographical, political, and technological imaginations. This work in Athens is a convergence and continuation of media activisms elsewhere, carrying collective methods of voicing and articulating belonging across migratory contexts. And it sounds out anticolonial media activisms that feed back across histories and geographies of resistance and liberation. These media activisms unmake colonial hierarchies of voice and knowledge; and make anticolonial publics, communicating across radical sonic cartographies and building political cultures that contest the colonialities of borders and citizenship regimes.
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