Title: "The Politics and Poetics of Mishearing and South-South Imaginaries"  

Abstract: How might we understand the potentialities of sound when it is misheard? What do we make of hearing when it generatively transcends the limits of aural intelligibility? This paper is a preliminary exploration of the phenomenon of aural apophenia—error of perception, a kind of mishearing—, to theorize the potentialities of sound to confuse, allure, and bring to life yet-to-exist, imagined affinities across difference. I pursue this inquiry by tracing two case studies: the unlikely musical affinities between Japan and Ethiopia through the circulation of musical sounds of enka, a sentimental popular music genre from 1950s Japan, and an idiosyncratic Okinawan musicologist Yamanouchi Seihin’s theories of musical affinities between Okinawa and indigenous peoples of South America. What kinds of political imaginaries might emerge by taking these idiosyncratic mishearings seriously within the historical contexts of multiple imperialisms and the US militarism? Through this speculative exercise, I am interested in exploring how mishearing, taken as a generative practice of sonic equivocation, enables the temporal and geographical otherwise that signals towards the south-south connections that were, that could have been, and could be.

Marié Abe is a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, her research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. Her scholarship is driven by her interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. In other words, she investigates how the culturally particular ways in which people listen to and make (musical) sounds elucidate the relationship between power, human difference, and understandings of space.

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