Event

“Sounding the City and the Nation: Towards an Acoustemology of Tel Aviv’s ‘African Refugee Crisis’”
Room 266, Everson Hall

Sarah Hankins, 
Assistant Professor of Sound Studies, UC San Diego

Israel’s recent push to deport some 37,000 Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who have been present in the country since the early 2000s has re-energized a fractious nationwide debate over the implications of non-Jewish African population growth.  While some Israelis welcome the plitim[refugees] and champion pluralist ideals, others argue that these “infiltrators” threaten Israel’s national security and its Jewish identity.  This so-called “African refugee crisis” plays out with heightened urgency in south Tel Aviv, where non-citizen Africans and working-class Israeli communities are locked in competition for limited space, resources, and political legitimacy.  My talk explores the central role of music, sound, and the aural in the material and ideological “territorialization” of Israeli space during a period of unprecedented demographic change and social instability.  Attending to a polyvocal urban soundscape dense with music and activism, work and play, I listen for the momentary and sustained contacts between sounds, bodies, and spaces that (re)produce south Tel Aviv as variously “Israeli” and “African” terrain.  I map these precarious neighborhood topographies with reference to the larger narratives of home, belonging, exile, and diaspora that animate Israel’s cultural imaginary.  Ultimately, I trace the roots of the Tel Aviv conflict to a national ideological crisis, in which Zionist “affective ecologies” (Park et. al. 2011) that have historically figured an immutable tie between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel are increasingly destabilized by forces of globalization.

Made possible by support from the William E. Valente Endowment in Music and the UC Junior Faculty Lecture Circuit, which is supported by the UC Davis Humanities Institute and the UC Humanities Research Institute.

Sarah Hankins is trained as an ethnomusicologist, with research interests in sound studies of conflict in the globalizing metropolis, Afro-diasporic popular musics, history of technology, music and gender, and sonic dimensions of clinical psychoanalysis. Her articles appear in Black Music Research Journal, City and Society, Women and Music, Ethnomusicology Review, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; she also reviews new monographs for Popular Music and other journals. Hankins is currently writing a book on musical nightlife and political aesthetics among African refugees and migrants in urban Israel, which is an outgrowth of her 2015 Harvard University doctoral dissertation. She has held teaching positions at Wellesley College, Brown University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston. Hankins is the current Co-Chair of the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce (GST) of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and a recipient of the GST’s Marcia Herndon Award. Her past fieldwork and research has been funded by the Anna Rabinowitz Fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Ongoing projects include ethnographic work with the Black Lives Matter political movement, research on the intersections of sound, violence, and memory, and writing on ethnographic fieldwork ethics. A member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002–09, Hankins served in Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C., and throughout Latin America, winning Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards from the Department of State for her reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a dance music producer and DJ, she has held club residencies in Boston and Tel Aviv, performed at the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, and collaborated with electronic musicians and performance artists in a wide variety of idioms. Her remix collection Been in the Storm So Long (2009) was independently released in consultation with Smithsonian Folkways.

Everson Hall, Davis, CA

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