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Sound as Method: The Politics of Hearing Gaza under Siege 
Abstract by Dr. Shaira Vadasaria On Session III-06  (Gaza on Screen)

On Tuesday, November 30 at 2:00 pm

2021 Annual Meeting

Abstract
How do we hear Gaza under siege? What do embodied and land-based claims to return, such as those that were enunciated during Gaza’s Great March of Return render audible? As theorists of colonialism in the anti-colonial and decolonial tradition have argued, the ‘sense-experience’ gives evidence to the colonial wound (Fanon 1961; Mignolo 2009). The sensory encounter indexes where and how race lives, thereby revealing the body and its ways of knowing as an epistemic site. Departing from Western knowledge structures that privilege the mind over the body and its registers (i.e. the senses, affect, intuition, dreams, desires etc.), scholars of decolonial thought urge us to pay close attention to the ‘body-politics of knowledge’ (Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2009) as an instinctive and visceral epistemic site to understand colonial formations and decolonial projects through. This paper reflects on what can be known epistemically and otherwise through paying attention to the politics of the senses in Gaza.  Methodologically, it brings together scholarship in Palestine Studies, Sound Studies and decolonial thought. It draws on a range of sound recordings taken from the eighteen-month popular protest including documentary footage and soundbites published by protestors and local TV and international press to explore what can be heard through and across the Great March of Return.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Colonialism