Salem, Sara; Western, Tom; (2025) Anticolonial Antiphonies. Social Text , 43 (1) pp. 23-47. 10.1215/01642472-11573341.

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Abstract

This article narrates anticolonial antiphonies: an ongoing praxis of political reverberation and relay, a shuttling of strategies that carry across time, space, and language, connecting decolonial movements across histories and geographies. Antiphony inserts discord and dissonance into colonial orders, seeking to bring other worlds into being, and the article hears how sound carries movements that defy colonial cartographies and classifications, bringing together places and struggles that are often understood separately. It does so by combining the authors’ work on anticolonial histories, afterlives, and futures in Cairo, Egypt, and in Athens, Greece, in the process hearing the Mediterranean — particularly the Eastern Mediterranean — as a space that holds multiple imaginations of decolonization and futurity. The article tells four stories, moving antiphonally between these two cities, listening to (1) revolutionary and counterrevolutionary soundscapes, (2) “beatmapping” practices that connect migration and mobilization, (3) broadcast voices that affectively disseminated anticolonial resistance, and (4) the insurgent geographies created by sonic uprising. In so doing, it articulates a sonic third worldism that connects these movements and stories and places the sonic expressions foregrounded in the article into a much bigger political history. Anticolonial antiphony and sonic third worldism, though muffled and always under threat, continue to reach out toward decolonial futures — across the Mediterranean and as far as they can carry.

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