Sounding the masses: sonic collectivity and the politics of noise in Earl Lovelace's Salt

Abstract

This paper argues that Earl Lovelace's Salt offers the sonic as a fundamental medium of identification, collectivity, and political mobility. The paper frames the novel within larger theoretical debates regarding the problematics of forming a collective political will that avoids the reductive tendencies inherited from colonial regimes. While much of this literature focuses on the need to create more meaningful categories of identification and representation, I argue that Lovelace veers the debate away from this drive toward meaning, and instead offers an alternative mode of identification and collectivity outside the domains of meaning – what I call a politics of unmeaning. That is, in crafting a mode of collectivity outside the regimes of meaning inherited from the shared legacies of colonialism and slavery, Lovelace seeks a significative and expressive material that performs Trinidadian subjectivity without fastening it to any particular narrative or paradigm – using noise as a central medium.

Keywords:

• the sonic
• postcolonial politics
• Earl Lovelace
• Afro-Caribbean literature
• black music and performance
• political collectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The introduction of the British battleship HMS Dreadnought is widely considered the turning point of naval war technology in the twentieth century. Its emergence in 1906 led to an arms race among Europe's major naval powers leading up to the First World War (Fairbanks 1991).