Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations | ix
Prologue | 1
1 Shatter | 7
Excursus 1: Calculation and Stricture in Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station | 38
2 The Rhythm of Life | 49
Excursus 2: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Phonetic Border-Crossings | 91
3 Mouth(piece) | 100
Excursus 3: Sharon Hayes’s Addresses | 145
4 A Use of Ears | 158
Excursus 4: The Drive to Listen in Ultra-red’s Militant Sound Investigations | 191
Acknowledgments | 207
Notes | 209
Selected Bibliography | 233
Index | 243

About the Author

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford, 2017). As a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2019–20, she has been developing deconstructive field-recording methodologies to explore contemporary urban marginalization and resistance.

Reviews

Shattering Biopolitics brilliantly weaves together two threads: it carefully auscultates the philosophical discourses of deconstruction and biopolitics in order to sound them out on their aural imagination; and it pursues a true 'politics of listening, ' a performative intervention that seeks to reconfigure the way we lend our ears.---Peter Szendy, Brown University

A tour-de-force analysis of the role of sound in contemporary biopolitics and a landmark volume within and beyond music studies.---Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota