Sonic colonialities: listening, dispossession, and the (re) making of Anglo-European nature

Creative and feminist geographers position listening as a way to build moreresponsive, ethical, and reciprocal relations to people and environments. In thispaper I argue that for geographers to situate listening – in the broadest definitionas ‘sensing, attuning, and noticing’ – as part of a creative approach to repara-tive practice, we must first understand how Anglo-European modes of listeningand interpreting the world through sound are shaped by ‘sonic colonialities’.These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments thatare derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre-colonial natures, imagined asdiscrete, unmediated, and possessable. Given the now prolific interest of geog-raphers in sonic practices, this paper argues for a closer and more critical atten-tion to how listening and sound methods are inherently determined by soniccolonialities. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practicescreate and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporaryecological sound art.