From strange rooms: Music, landscape, and the failure of response

Reeling from the experience of watching Aryan Kaganof’s Night is Coming: Threnody for the Victims of Marikana, a documentary commissioned by the Hearing Landscape Critically network in conjunction with their conference at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2013, it is difficult to escape an overwhelming sense of dislocation, powerlessness, and collusion. The film forces us to confront our worst fears, namely that even as we seek to understand the environments and impulses that motivate the most brutal forms of human violence and degradation, we are inescapably implicated in their continual unfolding. Furthermore, the film irresistibly insists that our reactions as intellectuals, academics, or even simply as reluctant witnesses, ultimately compounds the histories of asymmetry, exploitation, and domination upon which such violence relies and which it ritualistically performs. It leaves us no space from which to try and comprehend the magnitude of a recent historical moment that, as Peter Alexander (2013, 131) has written, became for South Africa ‘a seismic event’, albeit one that may simply have ‘produced new faults from existing tectonic stress’. And it broadcasts our culpability, tearing away the critical veil and demanding that academic practice urgently reassess its relationship with direct action and with the institutional frameworks from which it gains and amplifies its authorit