meLê yamomo
When a lover says "I love you", is it the words or is it the sayer that matters?
"To explain how performative or sonic understandings are constructed and constituted, I unpack the entanglement of the medium, the body, and the sonus. I theorize sonus as the sound equivalent of the image. If the image is the relationship that transpires between a picture and a body, sonus is the relationship that our bodies have to sound. Through this idea, I analyze how collective ideologies or cultural imaginations ethnicities, race, gender, class, and articulations of identities and communities are understood and performed. How does the soni move from one sound to another? How might they migrate from one body to another. What does it mean for one body to perform another body as a medium? Does this remove the sonus from its embodied specificity. Can the agency of a community of bodies be taken away when its sonic media is appropriated by a different body? A different community?"
meLê yamomo: "As an academic born and raised in a former colonial context and who has been educated, now working, and receiving funding in Europe, writing about my postcolonial context, how have I not become the colonizer of my own culture? Am I wearing my culture to gain capital in the Anglo and Western European academic and artistic institutions? Or am I wearing the academic hat for the privilege it grants me as a postmigrant in the European metropolis? Is decoloniality an academic drag?"