Connecting Resonances: A decolonial intervention into Sound Studies by listening to the Global South

Connecting Resonances: A decolonial intervention into Sound Studies by listening to the Global South

The proposed project intends to create a fertile entry point into the history, practice and aesthetics of sound media in South Asia as a key area of the Global South, aiming to understand the unique auditory cultures and sonic sensibility of this under-explored area in the light of the transcultural confluence between Global North and South. Such new knowledge fundamentally shifts the perspectives in sound studies and in a global media art history with a decolonial approach of co-listening and exploring medial reciprocity. Mentored by leading sound scholar and theorist Prof. Brandon LaBelle at the University of Bergen, and working with other institutional partners in Norway and internationally, the project re-examines a fundamental issue in the studies of modernity and globalisation concerned with media cultural encounters and technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of postcolonial confluence. The project is a first of its kind to research an ignored area of sound studies by putting South Asian sound and media scholars, artists and practitioners on the international platform, making their work exposed to the wider global audience for a much-needed critical engagement and equity in scholarship. The project benefits the large pool of practitioners active in South Asia, whose work has often been neglected in the Eurocentric field of critical media studies and media art history. The project makes a sustained attempt to assess their work toward a new decolonial theory of sound media in the form of a book and other outputs, aiming to address a number of critical issues in sound studies.