Acoustics of Empire

Overview & Synopsis

Acoustics of Empire articulates what we might call a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Increasingly, music and sound studies have turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth century. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the Long Nineteenth Century through the lens of geopolitical power, Acoustics of Empire recovers a history of sound that is bound up with, even as it elides, questions of imperial and colonial rule. Bringing together contributions from historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary critics, the book emphasizes historical moments in which academic disciplines like musicology and history were created at the same moment and often in connection with global empires.