Paper short abstract:

This paper compares sounded practices in Buenaventura, Colombia at neighborhood gatherings under urban violence (2012), the 2017 general strike, and an assassinated leader’s 2018 funeral, tracing the affective politics of music across the waxing and waning horizons of the political over time.

Paper long abstract:

Life in the Colombian city of Buenaventura is marked by racist exclusion, systemic neglect, and unprosecuted violence, but also by ubiquitous and odds-defying joy, tied to ludic practices using loud sound systems. If politics is unthinkable without a future toward which political action is directed, then the foreclosure of possible futures in Buenaventura exemplifies the end of politics, making of Buenaventura's musical joy simple escapism. Or perhaps it reveals a new politics of the present tense, which relinquishes systemic change for fleeting but joyous solidarity, making it, like Roberto Esposito's notion of the "impolitical," less apolitical than politically agnostic. In Buenaventura, these same "escapist" sounded practices were fundamental to the surprisingly widespread, disciplined, and successful citywide strike of 2017, moving musical joy firmly into the political sphere. Nonetheless, the return of familiar necro-political exclusions, with the 2018 assassinations of grassroots leaders, has again shunted these sounded practices beyond politics, even as their affective ferocity seems to stand in political reserve. This paper compares performative listening practices at three moments in Buenaventura's recent history: neighborhood musical gatherings circa bloody 2012, the use of sound systems in police-occupied neighborhoods and road blockages in the 2017 strike, and the musicalized funeral of assassinated leader Temístocles Machado in February 2018, to compare the political ramifications of sounded practices in Buenaventura at these three moments. In doing so, this paper aims to describe diachronically how the affective politics of music work across the waxing and waning of the horizons of the political.