Keywords

Black Sound Studies; Sonic Fugitivity; Ontological Erasure; Technocultural Poethics; Post-Colonial Theory; Sonic Archive

Abstract

This thesis stages an auto-poetic ethnography that listens to, and moves with, the anterior spaces of Black life. Those murmurs, hums, musical hesitations, and infrastructural vibrations that refuse capture by dominant epistemic regimes. Drawing from Ramon Amaro’s reading of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye’s reflections on sound, Fred Moten’s insights on displacement, and Tendayi Sithole’s attention to the phonographic, the project situates music production as method and unworlding. Through engagements with the 808, sampling, sound systems, and embodied listening across Florida. Spaces like the warehouse, the party, record stores, and community become the work of Black voices, and thought, both an archive and a site of performance. It follows how the plantation’s acoustic logics persist within contemporary production, how the plot and its holes hold clandestine possibilities of intimacy and repair, and how rhythm acts as refusal: a return, a loop, and a force that reconfigures humanist frames. The title, Rhythm Against Poethics, gestures toward a practice that comes in contact and in tension with poethics as a disciplinary order, refashioning sound as cosmological advocacy, an archival praxis, and a mode of collective repair and becoming.

Thesis Completion Year

2025

Thesis Completion Semester

Fall

Thesis Chair

Janz, Bruce

College

College of Community Innovation and Education

Department

School of Interdisciplinary Studies

Thesis Discipline

Interdisciplinary Studies

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus Access

None

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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Rights Statement

In Copyright