Sonic displacement, sonic placemaking: the poetics of diaspora in Yoko Tawada, Jessica Hagedorn, and M.I.A.

2017-07-18This project investigates the ways in which sound irrupts in the work of Asian diasporic writers. Combining sound studies practices with a phenomenological approach to transnational texts, the project seeks to not only develop new readings of diasporic texts—readings which argue for the indispensability of diasporic literature within a larger literary and social discourse—but to contribute to a new critical framework for reading sound in literature. ❧ Each chapter listens closely to a text authored by an Asian diasporic author. I take note of the sonic irruptions that enfold (and are enfolded within) the short stories‐cum‐literary‐essays of Yoko Tawada, written in both her native Japanese and German; Jessica Hagedorn’s immigrant punk‐rock novel The Gangster of Love; and Sri Lankan/British rapper M.I.A.’s first and second albums Arular and Kala. Each text is rife with word play, neologisms, code‐switching, exacting transcriptions of speech and soundscapes, sonic worldbuilding, and other forms of sonic manipulation. My project explores not only the aesthetic, affective, and philosophical implications of these sounds, but also their political valences as sites of productive rupture in hegemonies of language. ❧ Through echo and sympathetic vibration, sonic irruptions in literary works make audible a twofold sonic displacement: one is the author’s displacement from a local ecosystem of sound; the other is the author’s displacement from a community of spoken language. Together, these two aspects constitute the sonic dimension of what diaspora studies refers to as the homeland: a native soundscape that is the originary space of sonic subject formation. Displaced from their native soundscapes, but never fully at home within their new sonic environments, diasporic authors paradoxically enjoy the freedom to make metalinguistic commentary on both the target (second language) and heritage languages (mother tongue). If language is the principal force of hegemony, then diasporic authors’ sonic irruptions constitute a feedback loop, the noise produced by bodies simultaneously immersed in and alienated by language. This feedback, I believe, has the capacity to overload and reconfigure language and the relationships in and between the bodies that it seeks to regulate