Leonardo Cardoso | Associate Professor, Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts

Sound-Politics in São Paulo

I study the modern state as an assemblage of performances, including political negotiations, law enforcement initiatives, technoscientific innovation, bureaucratic protocols, and judicial decisions. More specifically, I am interested in how sound (oral communication, music, or noise) mediates and informs these state operations. My approach to “performance,” broader than that of most performance studies scholars (who focus on cultural and artistic practices), is diversifying the scholarship produced at Texas A&M University. It contributes to cross disciplinary conversations on social inequality, political corruption, police violence, and environmental pollution. My research builds on sound studies, a vibrant interdisciplinary field that emerged in the early 2000s at the intersection of humanities and social sciences. In tackling sound, hearing, and acoustics in the broadest sense of those terms, sound studies scholars have made two major contributions to how we study society. First, they have questioned assessments that focus solely on the visual sphere (such as images and texts). This perspective has led not only to innovative research showing the presence of sound and hearing in previously “silent” historical contexts but to a broader critique of firmly established conventions about the senses (e.g., hearing is “subjective” while vision is “objective”). Second, sound studies authors have challenged the premise that music and oral communication are the only auditory domains for studying culture. In that sense, while the field has close ties with ethnomusicology and communication/media studies, sound studies has something unique to offer in the gaps within and between these two fields.

Working on my doctoral dissertation, I noticed that few sound studies scholars focused on the relations between sound, law, and governance, especially from an ethnographic perspective. I also observed that most sound studies publications examined Europe and North America rather than the Global South. Sound-Politics in São Paulo (Oxford University Press, 2019) addresses both lacunae by proposing a sociopolitical analysis of environmental noise in the most populous city in the Americas. Based on years of fieldwork, the book shows how noise is tied to major issues confronting large cities today, including environmental degradation, violent crime, religious intolerance, and spatial segregation. Urban noise is a complex issue because it encompasses sounds from a wide range of sources: vehicles, neighbors, churches, bars, restaurants, construction sites, factories, public transportation systems, and airports, to name a few. This problem often requires local governments to mediate between public health concerns and individual rights, as well as welfarist interventionism and laissez-faire neoliberalism. The book demonstrates how we can study the modern state through sound, and sound through the state by describing how groups – lawmakers, homeowners, engineers, lawyers, judges, police officers, bar owners, and urban planners – attempt to insert or remove sounds from the sphere of state control. This analytical approach, which I call sound-politics, is the book’s main framework.

Sound-Politics in São Paulo is also one of the first sound studies monographs to use ActorNetwork Theory (ANT) in its methodology. ANT is a sociological/anthropological approach developed in the 1980s by social scientists affiliated with the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at ParisTech, among them Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and Antoine Hennion. In focusing on the complex relationships between human and nonhuman agents (or actors), ANT questions preestablished distinctions between society, nature, and technology. For example, in Sound-Politics in São Paulo I show how the creation of a noise ordinance includes not only engineers and lawmakers, but also a large number of actors such as legal documents, sound level meters, noise measurement procedures, soundproofing materials, sound amplifiers, and prospective offenders. The book argues that an approach sensitive to “the multiple interactions within and between sonic complexes, axes of debate, governmental dilemmas, and governmental solutions” (p. 215) is a procedural framework for local governments to tackle environmental noise.

For Barbara Weinstein, Silver Professor of History at New York University and the author of two groundbreaking books on São Paulo, Sound-Politics in São Paulo is a “remarkable and innovative book” that “opens up a whole new arena for analyzing struggles over the urban environment, and for considering the often irreconcilable expectations that city dwellers harbor regarding the quality of urban life.” Regarding its methodology, ANT scholar Antoine Hennion called the book “a brilliant study on the ‘paradox of control’” at the intersection of “sound studies, of Science and Technology Studies and post-ANT authors, and of urban policies and post-Foucaldian studies.” Choice, the publishing division of the American Library Association and a premier source for academic book reviews, recommended Sound-Politics in São Paulo as “a well-written book on a most interesting and important subject” and “a welcome addition to the literature on noise pollution and especially its definition, control, and regulation.” At the time of this writing, Sound-Politics in São Paulo is one of the twenty-five best-selling books on Amazon.com in the category “ethnomusicology,” and one of the ten best-selling books on Alibris.com in the category “noise pollution.” In January 2020, I was interviewed by O Estado de São Paulo (one of Brazil’s largest newspapers) for a half-page story on possible administrative solutions for the thousands of complaints the city receives about loud music from street parties – a topic discussed in the book.

I want this book to be accessible to those who have generously offered their time to talk with me and answer my questions. I also intended for this book to serve as a reference for urban planners, policymakers, politicians, and urbanites in Brazil. I hope that Sound-Politics in São Paulo can help those groups understand the complexity of environmental noise as a social problem. For those reasons, I consider it crucial to have this book translated into Portuguese, thus making it accessible to those without whom there would be no book in the first place.

Olga Dror | Professor, History

Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975

When you look at this unassuming picture, what do you think about? When I first saw it, I thought it expressed a peaceful, happy childhood. With a grinning cat, a cute little boy measures his height on New Year Day. For a moment the picture’s peacefulness made me forget that I saw it in a Hanoi newspaper published during a fierce war. When I read the caption under the picture, I understood its connection with the wartime reality and its intended message. It reads: “I am a year older; already several centimeters taller; soon I will be able to join the army and to fight the Americans until they turn tail and flee.”

This picture with caption, published in the 1969 New Year issue of Thiếu niên tiền phong (Pioneer), reminded me of a joke that appeared in a 1972 Saigon magazine for children, Thằng Bờm (Youngster Bờm): a student assigned to write about the armed forces branch in which he preferred to enlist turned in a blank sheet of paper and explained to his teacher that “I hear that in several years there will be peace, so I think by the age of eighteen I will be free from going into the army.”

These two attitudes toward serving in the military contrast the younger generations in North and South Vietnam; they also contrast the two societies in which these young people lived. Many shelves of books, more than 30,000, have been written about the Vietnam War, yet not one has been written about Vietnamese youth who lived through the war and about the differences in policies toward them in the North and in the South. Not one.

My book explores the creation of youth identities in the North and the South based on texts written by adults for youth and by young people themselves, published in newspapers, magazines, other literary productions, and textbooks between 1965 and 1975 as well as on the study of social, educational, and religious organizations. I have analyzed these issues comparatively in North and South Vietnam. The war in Vietnam presents a unique case because of the length of the conflict during which a new generation was raised (unlike many other important but shorter conflicts). The creation of a cohesive society is especially important in wartime, and particularly when a war is fought inside against an enemy ostensibly of the same language and nationality. In Vietnam, the younger generations on both sides had not only to maintain a certain social order but also to fight for it in a prolonged conflict.

The communist North established a rather homogenous society and mandated a common identity corresponding to the goal of the ruling Party. The State and the Party endeavored to shape Vietnamese youth not only through school curricula and organized activities, but also through numerous publications. With state sponsorship, these publications were not evaluated in terms of literary quality or market success. What mattered was their faithfulness to the political agenda of the state.

Unlike the North, the South Vietnamese government did not exert concerted efforts to propagandize its policies among the youth, nor did it have firmly established policies in this regard. Publications for youth in the South came from independent sources that had to mobilize resources to publish and compete for attention in a market. The anti-communist South, in its attempt to juxtapose itself to the totalitarian character of society in the North, allowed significantly more intellectual freedom and, as a result, was inundated with different opinions that translated into different identities for adults and youth. Youth publications reflect this array of opinions ranging from support of the government to strongly anti-war sentiments. Moreover, children in the South were not taught to hate the regime in the North—until the final years at school they were not taught about political systems. In the writings from the South addressed to them and written  by them, I found no resentment towards the Communists.

I argue that the South granted their youth the specificities of their age, of their stages of age-development, while the North limited them, fostering a new generation of steadfast fighters for the cause. By doing so, the Communist North created, albeit under coercive pressure, a harmony, while the South appeared to be in disunity. Compared with the South, the North put considerably more effort into raising the new generations to join the armed struggle with minimal ideological vacillation. This was in some respects a significant advantage during wartime.

Meanwhile, in the South, a great mix of differing views failed to instill a uniform conviction in the righteousness of the Southern cause. The lack of the regimented Northern uniformity in the South might be celebrated as a step to a more democratic development in a previously non-democratic society, but it hardly helped Southern youth to mobilize for the war.

Stephen Riegg | Associate Professor, History

Russia's Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914

This book explores the link between the Russian empire and the Armenian diaspora, a relationship that provides deep insight into Russian strategies of imperialism. Conservative bureaucrats and liberal Russian intellectuals alike often imagined the Armenians who populated Russia’s territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist state’s metropolitan centers as avaricious, unclean, and potentially disloyal — “Asiatic” was a favorite label. Yet the tsars also valued the Armenian diaspora’s interimperial and international connections, grounded in ecumenical and economic ties between distant Armenian communities, and sought to benefit from the Armenian nation’s straddling of the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires. Recruited from abroad as Russia’s colonizers, entrepreneurs, and soldiers in the early nineteenth century, Armenians from neighboring Muslim states flocked to the domain of the Christian emperor.

The results of this imperial project were paradoxical. Armenians enjoyed exclusive privileges—from reduced taxation to relative religious and cultural freedom—and many communities from Tiflis in the South Caucasus to St. Petersburg prospered. Yet the Armenian encounter with modernity in the nineteenth century yielded a complex interplay of national and imperial identities. Tsarist agents lauded Armenian traders’ contributions to the economic development of the imperial periphery but distrusted their affiliations with British and French merchants in Asia Minor. The government supported an Armenian family’s establishment of an elite lyceum in Moscow but prohibited the formation of smaller Armenian academies elsewhere. Tsarist diplomats amplified the clout of the Armenian Church in European capitals, but the government shuttered Armenian parish schools and imprisoned clergy when it detected links between the church and a rising nationalist movement. In the late 1800s, a multifaceted Armenian nationalism infused students, aristocrats, and clerics. Yet even during this challenge to tsarist authority, Russian statesmen and Armenian clergy continued to pursue parallel aims.

To examine how tsarist officialdom perceived and engaged with Armenians, I use state and regional correspondence, bureaucratic and ethnographic reports, military records, royal decrees, travelogues, petitions, popular newspapers, and other sources. This empirically rich book utilizes rare unpublished archival sources I collected at the Russian State Historical Archive (St. Petersburg), the Russian National Library (St. Petersburg), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow), the Russian State Military History Archive (Moscow), the Central Historical Archive of Moscow, the Russian State Library (Moscow), and the National Archives of Armenia (Yerevan).

My book upends the historiography by challenging one-dimensional narratives of this encounter. Many twentieth-century historians—mainly Armenians—presented the Russian conquest of Eastern Armenia in 1828 as the timely deliverance of a fellow Christian people, echoing the Stalinist trope of “friendship of peoples.” In the post-Stalinist era, researchers continued to underscore the Marxist vision of a supranational proletarian movement that pushed beyond bourgeois nationalisms on the path toward Communism. Even when glasnost’ and perestroika helped Soviet scholarship move away from ideologically driven histories of Russo-Armenian relations, they continued to bypass the contradictions of imperial policy and to outline a ubiquitous “Armenian Question.” Post-Soviet Armenian and Russian historians have produced incisive analyses of diverse sources, yet the tendency to present Russians and Armenians either as allies or adversaries has been slow to fade.

In contrast to such accounts, my book argues that Russia’s successful and failed attempts to absorb Armenians demonstrate that the full spectrum of nationalities policies could be, and in this case was, applied to individual minority groups. For Armenians (and some other ethnonational groups) imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities.