What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more.

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

André Breton defined surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” But to what extent can we begin to comprehend this mode of thinking? Can we actually uncouple reason from thought? And if we could—would it even be fruitful?

With the rise in protests and demonstrations across the Américas against Neoliberalism, Police violence, privatization of public resources, and the like, such as in the case of the BLM protests, Indigenous protests in Guatemala, and NODAPL in the Dakotas, we must ask ourselves: how do we remember violence? What is the State’s role in creating/allowing these various forms of violence to manifest and realize themselves? How do these forms of violence and trauma affect the way we perceive space and place? Our communities? The world around us?