Iron Gongs and Singing Birds: Paths of Migration and Acoustic Assemblages of Alterity in the Former Dutch Colonial Empire

This dissertation investigates the roles of nonhuman (object and animal) entities in auditory practices that construct selfhood, homeland, and memory for people in migration, in order to draw broader conclusions about the aural formation of subject-object relationships in colonial empires and in present-day Europe and the Caribbean. I focus on two sonic objects that have traveled with colonial and postcolonial migrants in the former Dutch colonial empire: (1) traditional Javanese gamelan (pitched percussion orchestra) instruments that traveled with indentured laborers and their descendants to... Mehr ...