{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021726535341830822, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0005793742757821553, 'mean_word_length': 5.678916827852998, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Learning to Listen

scape. Africa in Stereo documents the ways in which Africans themselves theorize sound and media–often differentially to Euromodern understandings. It locates the pan-African imagination in the “self-consciously inventive black modernism” that moves through popular media in the form of sound, aesthetics, and performativities (23). The archives and material artifacts associated with this sounded Africanness condense from these aesthetic practices. Together, they form a stratum of global belonging that draws from global media networks while remaining substantively sovereign. Jaji’s attention to processes of sonic placemaking highlights the largely intangible but deeply political work popular media does for African and Afrodiasporic people. The book’s theoretical framework approaches Africa itself as an assemblage of people, practices, and media that condenses during the PanAfrican movement and shifts to new modes in the current conjuncture, a formation Jaji calls post-Africa. Rather than survey the soundscapes of Africa, it traces the soundand mediascape that is Africa. Sound is a critical substance to pan-African unification, Jaji shows, and a primary material by which its components relate to each other. This attention to the relationship between global infrastructures and local aesthetic practices suggests modes by which anthropologists of sound might situate their work—in addition to musical lyrics or styles, for instance, what Jaji calls stereomodernity can be mapped in terms of its sonic densities, its reverberations and noises, its representations in musical notation and poetics, or its correspondence to the exchange of certain commodities. Anthropologists will also recognize the value of Jaji’s largely literary methods to emerging ethnographic practices of sound and the sensory. Here, archival excavation serves as a kind of historical anthropology that accompanies ethnographic methods, tracing sonic affect from immediate experience through historical transformations. The concept of echolocation inhabits Africa in Stereo’s chapter on the circulation and articulation of African and diasporic literatures on the slave dungeons, a process by which practitioners use media to sound their location amidst other cultural objects. Together, she finds, African literatures locate and situate themselves primarily in terms of their relationship to each other, rather than in their opposition to dominant world systems. Anthropologists of soundmay consider approaching sonic practices and sounded objects in the field through the amplifier of echolocation, by which listening becomes an active mode of self-positioning within a relational history and a relational diasporic place. A further study might extend Jaji’s insights to develop ethnographic methods attuned to the relationship of local sonic experience, performance, and consumption to global modes of belonging. Anthropologists are equipped to trace the global implications of performance, listening, and recording in resonance with distant, but resonant, practices. Ethnographic methods might trace the transposition of affect from one material (i.e., ritual performance) to another (i.e., a digital hip-hop sample of an African ritual song) through Jaji’s framework. In Africa in Stereo, anthropologists of sound will locate new methods by which they can weigh both the sonic substance of cultural experience and that of global belonging.