Sonic persistence: Knowledge making beyond resistance in the Caribbean

This paper interrogates the link between sonic persistence and resistance. If, as Edwin Hill suggests, drawing on the work of James Parker, that legal and state mechanisms working to suppress certain sounds and musics can be understood as a system of “Acoustic Jurisprudence” than how can we trace persistence of the sonic against such repression as a form of resistance that goes beyond resistance to joy, creation, forms of knowledge-creation in sound? In order to examine this question, I compare various legal injunctions that sought to repress the sonic around the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with a comparison of the colonial contexts I then tabulate and examine the similarities and contrasts in the legal restrictions applied to sound and music in different colonial contexts. I show how French, Dutch, and Anglophone colonial attempts to repress “musicking” (Christopher Small) consistently failed. This then, reveals a process of sonic persistence that is both resistant and also more than simply resistance. The paper shows how this works in and across colonial contexts using examples from the French and Dutch Antilles, and Suriname.