The Necropolitics of Silence: Sound, Protest, and State Power in Colombia (2019-2021)

The Necropolitics of Silence: Sound, Protest, and State Power in Colombia (2019-2021) When: Thursday, October 22, 2026 1:00pm Where: Wesley W. Posvar Hall, 4130. 230 S Bouquet St, Pittsburgh Register here: Lunch will be served. Between 2019 and 2021, Colombia’s Paro Nacional (National Strike) established sound and music as central instruments of political protest. This lecture examines two significant instances of this phenomenon: the viral 2019 Cacerolazo Nacional, in which banging pots and pans spread across the country as a spontaneous form of dissent, and the 2021 Cacerolazos Sinfónicos, in which orchestral musicians brought their instruments into public demonstrations. Reading mediated sources, including videos, WhatsApp communications, press coverage, and human rights reports, as situated representations rather than transparent evidence of lived experience, this analysis develops a theoretical framework that extends Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics from lethal exposure to what might be termed aural governance. This framework, theorized here as a necropolitics of silence, accounts for how states render certain voices, communities, and experiences inaudible as a means of fragmenting and managing populations. In response to this imposed silence, citizens mobilized practices of noising and musicking to form ephemeral sonic communities that contested state-imposed inaudibility and briefly redistributed the sensible, reclaiming urban space for democratic claim-making. However, insofar as these practices functioned as political tactics rather than as elements of a broader strategy engaged with institutional politics, they also left the collectives and individuals involved vulnerable to both state repression and eventual absorption into institutional frameworks. This ambiguity, at once generative and self-limiting, offers a productive lens through which to examine the transformative potential and the political constraints of sound as a medium of resistance. Juan Fernando Velasquez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. He studies how sound, technology, and social life intersect across Latin America, bridging musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural history, and sound studies, with additional interests in brass bands, protest music, and ecomusicology. Sponsor by: Center for Latin American Studies