“Listening to the Inaudible”

Deborah Wong, Professor of Music, University of California Riverside

From Ferguson and beyond, spectacular moments of witnessing have dominated the news over the last six months. Whether focused on the ordinary or the extraordinary, I argue that intentionally deploying the intent to witness is profoundly different from the kind of sustained ethnographic work that marks ethnomusicology as a discipline. Yet it also draws on the same skills, from a willingness to attend deeply to the moment, to inviting a shift in subjectivity. I offer a genealogy of witnessing and then focus on listening acts focused on police violence. Listening and witnessing each radically disrupt the ethnographic impulse toward collecting, taking, owning, and having, and thus offer a way to decolonize ethnography and ethnomusicology. How might we shift our listening to silence, the inaudible, or the resentful refusal to speak?