Introduction

Performance Geographies

The importance of practice in producing senses of the world is fully realized in the idea of performance geographies. Drawing on theorists like Paul Gilroy, De Certeau, Soja, and Appadurai, Sonjah Stanley Niaah writes that, contrary to the separation of performance theory and geography in typical academic settings, “space can no longer be constituted as a passive void, but… a new spatial imagination allows for a reading of its structures or surfaces of articulation, which include the body, the cosmos and the city” (2010, 30). Building on studies of embodied practices and performances in cultural geography, she further details the need for “acknowledging that perceptions of space are mediated by popular cultural forms such as music and television, space is implicated in the sites where music is created, consumed and disseminated across time, through various local and global flows, and at all geographical scales” (32). This is an expansive understanding of the relationship between individual and collective bodily practices and space/place.

Such conceptions allow ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture to garner important insights into understandings of the world through performance. Kirstie A. Dorr, for example, uses Stanley Niaah’s conception of performance geographies to understand the potential of sonic performances to act toward counter-cartographies that reimagine “dominant arrangements of racial capitalist space and/or narratives of how social space can or should be understood, organized, and occupied” through being and sounding in spaces whose identities as places have been prescribed otherwise from the top down (2018, 9). As a theoretical orientation, performance geographies thus facilitates an understanding of media and expression as potent, embodied means of (re/un)mapping. Throughout this dissertation, I listen for ways in which WFHB engages in its own cartographic work through performance. Understood in relation to one another, the voices, musics, and other sonic elements that listeners encounter on the station airwaves can counter or reinforce top-down political cartographies.

Performances and spaces mediated through radio are always imaginative in nature. I have found Marié Abe’s work on the public sonic practice of chindon-ya especially helpful in incorporating sound, sociality, political economy, and imaginative practices and resources in understanding the production of space through performance. She writes:

Sound and social interactions don’t happen in space, or move across space; rather, space comes into being through the dynamic interrelations of multiple sounds, social encounters, and histories. I propose a parallel in thinking of space sonically: that space is produced through sonorous practices and encounters, and that sound does not simply happen in space, or across space, but dynamically produces space… ‘sounding’ is an affectively, politically, and discursively generative practice that produces a conception of space as a socially produced milieu. (2018, 29)

There are important material differences between broadcast performances and the cases Stanley Niaah, Dorr, and Abe examine, which are predominantly in-person musical events, i.e. audience members must physically be within earshot of the performers to witness it. Radio nonetheless relies on many of the same or similar values and means of social connection and relation to produce space, both in live events, some of which I discuss in this dissertation, and in broadcast practices that, while spatially dispersed, nonetheless have coherent spatial aspects.