Re’ee Hagay

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow

I am currently working on a book that reflects on sound and the excavation of the past in the margins of Israel’s national territory. Inspired by Nadia Abu El-Haj’s critique of Israeli archeology, Resonance and Excavation: An Archeology of Absence explores the relationship between sound, knowledge, and the politics of time and space in postcolonial Israel/Palestine. It conceives politics—either dominant or alternative—as operating through forms of perception that shape the objects that may or may not be admitted into historical records. Instead of the excavation of architectural remains as origins of Jewish territorial presence in Palestine, the medium of sound allows for a fractured and uncertain relationships between its origin of production and effect. The unlocalizable and at times unknown sources of sonic effects destabilize dominant structures of perception, particularly the recuperation of archeological objects ascribed with fixed national meanings. I excavate these elusive, present-absent sounds in border sites. The multilayered resonances of these sounds evoke the histories and losses of those who inhabit Israel’s territorial margins since the 1950s, the Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, but also of the Palestinians who inhabited these spaces before 1948. I therefore conceive borders not only as spatial markers but also as sites of alternative historical formations that become traceable through sonic excavation.  

In addition to my current book project, I am also developing a second project focused on drone technology, sound, and politics of perception. Currently titled “Drones: Politics of Sonic Formlessness,” this project conceives the drone as a technology that embodies a regime of knowledge and mass violence. The development of this technology is driven by claims of precise measurement, extensive collection and processing of information, and capacity for detection of micro-specific enemy objects. The violence of this weaponized technology, however, is also reflected in its sonic side effect, namely the drone sound that dominates the lived experience in territories under surveillance. Drones—as continuous, undividable masses of sound that resist and exceed categories of measurement, form, and perception—are also narrated and performed in the radical tradition of Black aesthetics, particularly in the work of musician Alan Silva. In Black aesthetics, I recognize critical gestures that help mark the distance between the knowledge system of drone technology and the sensory experience of drone sound on the ground, a distance extending through the formation and collapse of categories of perception. Engaging with critical perspectives of Edward Said and others, this project offers a transregional theorization of a dense network of connections between colonial politics and knowledge.