Lectures in Musicology: Abigail C. Lindo, Ohio State

Abigail C. Lindo, assistant professor, Comparative Studies and African American and African Studies at Ohio State, presents "Radical Sonic Disidentifications: Decolonial Sounds at Tremor." This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Music and The Ohio State University Libraries.

Tremor is a boutique music festival occurring in São Miguel, the largest island in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores (located in the North Atlantic Ocean). Organizers for the event curate a list of regional and international creatives, allowing them to import Black, Latinx, queer, and other diverse perspectives for sonic performances, installations and community workshops. The ambition is not to “eat the other” as Hooks (1992) would say, but organizers maintain cognizant of the sonic and experiential diversity on the island as modes of rewriting regional identity and articulating a distinct form of cosmopolitanism.

Performances at Tremor are forms of disidentification, which Muñoz (1999) describes as the process minoritized individuals use to recycle objects and ideas endowed with power in shaping normative meaning. Their music, speech, gestures and images project meanings onto the environment and articulate alternative understandings of intersectionally diverse experiences.

Live music events have long been associated with furthering collective values and providing spaces for individuals to elevate other aspects of their identities (Cudny 2014; Turino 2008). Using the phenomenological analysis of live performances from Tremor 2021, 2022 and 2023, Lindo demonstrates how sound is employed for the liberatory practice of disidentification to signal Afrofuturism (Hamilton 2017; Smith 2023) and for the decolonial remapping of sonic practices. While Lindo will approach this analysis and discussion by looking at the entirety of each performance, she will place special attention on the voice and ideas of presence, because the voice is used as a tool for Black worldmaking. This is something distinct in Western discourses outlining the progression of Black identity through the lens of modernism.

Abigail C. Lindo is assistant professor of Global Black Popular Music in the departments of Comparative Studies and African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She is a Jamaican-born researcher, educator, vocalist, and social scientist specializing in music and sound studies. Lindo's book project explores modern Lusophone identity politics and gender performances in sonic practices in the city of Ponta Delgada and the Azores, centering the experiences of female and queer musical practitioners.