Songs of Science: Musical Worlding in the American Space Age
Introduction: Songs of Science and Other Sonic Fictions
[W]e have no choice but to propose the most daring utopia, which is today, to begin with, not Earthly Paradise but the prevention of Hell on Earth.
—Darko Suvin, Defined by a Hollow
Even before the COVID-19 global pandemic blossomed like an interminable fungus in my last months of writing this dissertation, I could feel reality edging toward an apocalyptic imaginary. In July of 2019 I moved back to El Paso, Texas where I had grown up. I was leaving a difficult marriage and as a single mother graduate student couldn’t afford rent in the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, much less the childcare. And so I put all my belongings in storage and returned to the house in which I grew up with a couple of suitcases, a boxful of books, and my two-year old daughter in tow. It was a physical and emotional upheaval that required a different kind of labor than I had become accustomed to in the hallowed halls of the great university, but it was a welcome one. I felt privileged to have this place to escape to, this house that as a little girl I had watched my parents build. In many ways, it was my first cosmos, the space that shaped “all subsequent knowledge of any space, of any larger cosmos.”[1]
A few weeks after our arrival, on August 3rd, a 21-year-old man named Patrick Crusius drove 660 miles from East Texas to El Paso, walked into a Walmart with a semi-automatic weapon and opened fire with the aim of stopping a “Hispanic invasion.” Twenty-three people were killed and twenty-three injured. Some called it the deadliest anti-Latinx attack in recent U.S. history, but we all knew that we have been attacked for centuries in more or less apparent ways, through border policy, through the effects of environmental racism, through the genocidal violence against our Indigenous ancestors and comrades, through the sexual assault of brown female bodies evidenced in “rape trees”—trees found across the Southwest United States adorned with lingerie to signify acts of sexual assault to Latina immigrants. The shooting made it painfully clear to me that this act of violence, like so many others, encompassed our history, our cosmos, our future. This was the event that catalyzed my Borderscapes chapter.
In the ensuing weeks and months, El Pasoans grieved in the way they are accustomed to—by singing. Juan Gabriel’s 1984 ballad “Amor eterno,” which he wrote in honor of his mother has always been a beloved song for grieving among the Xicanx community. At the victims’ vigils, wakes, and funerals, the song would materialize in spontaneous eruptions and the crowd who had gathered would join in, a chorus of transcendent love asserting a defiant transnational presence. It was a powerful symbol for the moment because it signifies deeply for many on an individual level, recalling specific loved ones who have passed away. In its representation of all the people and relationships that had been lost to everyone present, it also came to signify the community as a whole—to borrow John Coltrane’s phrase, “When the singer says ‘I’ the audience hears ‘we.’”[2] Here my grief for my grandpa and my neighbor’s grief for her friend are woven together in musical solidarity as a grief offering to the victims of the shooting. At the same time, the song binds us to a shared cultural history, giving us an identity to latch onto that is both the same as and different from the identity that Patrick Crusius wanted to eradicate from what is currently known as the United States. In this way, our grief comes to represent who we are, not only because it is a shared piece of culture that has saturated our lives, but because we are so used to grieving that performing grief means performing identity.
Almost immediately, the response to the tragedy was manifested as pride in our resilience, made explicit in the slogan “El Paso Strong,” which was displayed on storefronts, billboards, t-shirts, stickers, and murals all over town. But as everyone slowly forgot about the tragedy, on a national level first, and then on a local one, El Paso Strong rang hollow in my ears like that other signifier for political apathy, “thoughts and prayers.” If tragedy galvanizes those present in the moment, “Amor eterno” was perhaps too cathartic. I wonder: where is the border between reparative and destructive fantasy?
This question guides my dissertation, which offers a nondiachronic account of three techno-political worlding concepts. Starting with sound and music in the Space Age in Chapter 1, I then describe Anthropocene worlding through nature documentaries in Chapter 2, and finally first world/third world borderland relations in Chapter 3, thus tracing a conceptual continuum from utopia to dystopia. I start with two assumptions: first that Euro-American capitalist thought has been operating under a science-fiction worldview for the last century, and second that sound and music—primarily, but not limited to Western European art music—has helped shape this worldview as part of a social totality.
[1] This quote is borrowed from John R. Stilgoe, describing the work of Gaston Bachelard in the forward to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), viii. This idea informs my second chapter which theorizes the sonically conceptualized connection between the space of the home and outer space.
[2] Quoted in Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Ernest Bloch Lectures), 47.
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Read the full dissertation here.
