Sonic Essay:
Attempting to decolonize oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’
My initial interest in oceans and seas, particularly in relation to my back and forth travels across the Atlantic Ocean from South America to Europe, serves as a cornerstone for reflecting on my own positionality amid this dissertation. It provides a lens through which I navigate the interplay between the perceived global distinctions of the "West" and the "South". I perceive the in-between space of the oceans and seas as a navigator between cultural identities and borderlands. I have reflected on inbetweenness not only as a state of transit that people-in-transits experience when moving from one place to another—something I have been researching in this dissertation through Liminality (see Chapter Somewhere)—but also in the territorial sense, i.e. between the geographical borders of the ocean.
When I started encountering the polarizing notion of Europe and Latin America, it did not explicitly address the idea of what is ‘West’ and what is ‘South’. Instead, I was interested in the liminal state between them, which I associated with the oceans and seas, somehow blurring the boundaries between one and the other. Isabel Bredenbröker, one of the The February Journal editors of this sonic-essay ‘Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’’, motivated me to look further into these assumed polarities, questioning whether such a clear division really exists today.
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READ/LISTENING HERE
Sound piece only HERE
To cite this item: Garland M (2024) Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’. The February Journal,03: 23–38.
Abstract
The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity. Through voice narrative and sound archives, this sound piece challenges linear narrative by playing with the idea of fragments. In it, traces of oceans and seas overlap, reflecting through sound and theory the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean and North Seas, as containers and corridors of entangled past-present colonial histories. The piece opens new ground for interpreting hybrid cultures, a possible starting point for decolonizing oneself when standing between the so-called Global ‘West’ and ‘South.’
READ/LISTENING HERE
Sound piece only HERE
To cite this item: Garland M (2024) Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’. The February Journal,03: 23–38.
Abstract
The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity. Through voice narrative and sound archives, this sound piece challenges linear narrative by playing with the idea of fragments. In it, traces of oceans and seas overlap, reflecting through sound and theory the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean and North Seas, as containers and corridors of entangled past-present colonial histories. The piece opens new ground for interpreting hybrid cultures, a possible starting point for decolonizing oneself when standing between the so-called Global ‘West’ and ‘South.’