Abstract
Following the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, there have been many attempts to understand societal and political shifts which manifest in a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2013). Approaches looking at the ‘aesthetic’ element of these political moments have tended to focus on overtly political or engaged music of rappers, or manifestations of ‘art’ in public space. This thesis takes a different approach, focusing instead on the complex constellation of sonic archives that mediate sound and music in their multiple ontologies throughout the capital, underpinning sonic encounters in everyday lives. It asks: what is the nature of sonic archives in Tunis, how are they layered in the city, and how do they work to order: to order music’s ontologies, and to order listeners and bodies? How might a turn towards sonic archives complicate our notions of shifts in time, space and social organisation in Tunis following the revolution, bringing other temporalities to the fore? In this, I follow the approaches of Mbembe and Ochoa to archives: the assertion that archives are material and imaginary, foundational to the power of the state which constructs its ‘communities of time’ around its ‘fragments’ (Mbembe, 2002); and the assertion that sonic archives may be dispersed over multiple materials and spaces, their organisations contributing to and reflective of projects of ‘modernity’ that grapple over an ‘aural public sphere’ (Ochoa Gautier, 2006).This thesis is thus constructed as a journey around several different archival structures, all of which were formed and maintained at specific historical junctures, and all of which continue to act in the capital to organise sound and music. It takes an approach of media archaeology, following mediations of sound as they form ‘a narrative of jagged histories of encounter’ (Sykes & Steingo, 2019). We start in the state sonic archives, dispersed over multiple materials between radio stations, books and online Phonothèque lists, maintaining a power over senses of ‘original’ recordings which were foundational to national mythmaking around senses of tunisianité; we offset this archive with that of YouTube, access to which was opened by the revolution, to find that YouTube both troubles the workings of the state archive with tricky fragments, and can be pressed to use for the extension of a previous politics of classing and organising. We then move through the more hidden archives of cassette and CD shops, the Mp3 compilation makers of Galerie 7, and disparate shop and digital archives of vinyls, finding that many of their aesthetic forms, archival techniques and structures continue to be dispersed throughout the city, mediated by radio stations and the aesthetic workers of semi-public spaces to underpin communities and senses of ‘mass’ in a variety of ways. We’ll emerge with a picture of what we’ll call Tunis’s ‘archival situation’: an ever-evolving situation of corresponding musical and social mediation that happens through these archives and their infrastructures, which have nevertheless been formed from various historical junctures, political decisions, sensory habits, technologies, and stories. Throughout the thesis, we find that this archival situation is used to explore tensions between ‘culture’ and ‘jaww’, to lay claims to ‘music’ and to open up the possibilities of ‘curation’, and in attempts to understand the changing nature of publics and time in the post-revolutionary environment.
My hope is both that a focus on music, media and listeners might add something to conversations about aesthetics and politics in contemporary Tunis, and also that the specific case of Tunis might speak to understandings of the interrelationships between listening bodies, musical organisations and politics which currently animate questions in many areas of the world. The work joins calls particularly for a reorientation of work on sound and music toward the global South.
| Date of Award | 1 Apr 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Martin Stokes (Supervisor) |