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
Subjects
Poetry--Black authors--History and criticism; Rhythm--Study and teaching; Postcolonialism and music; American poetry--African American authors--History and criticism; Applied ethnomusicology
STARS Citation
Dacas, Jayvyn, "Rhythm Against Poethics" (2025). Honors Undergraduate Theses. 419.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hut2024/419
Dacas-Thesis Set
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, African American Studies Commons, Audio Arts and Acoustics Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, Hip Hop Studies Commons, Interactive Arts Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Music Performance Commons, Philosophy of Science Commons
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