Valente Lecture: Marié Abe, “The Politics and Poetics of Mishearing and South-South Imaginaries”

How might we understand the potentialities of sound when it is misheard? What do we make of hearing when it generatively transcends the limits of aural intelligibility? This paper is a preliminary exploration of the phenomenon of aural apophenia—error of perception, a kind of mishearing—to theorize the potentialities of sound to confuse, allure, and bring to life yet-to-exist, imagined affinities across difference. I pursue this inquiry by tracing two case studies: the unlikely musical affinities between Japan and Ethiopia through the circulation of musical sounds of enka, a sentimental popular music genre from 1950s Japan, and an idiosyncratic Okinawan musicologist Yamanouchi Seihin’s theories of musical affinities between Okinawa and indigenous peoples of South America. What kinds of political imaginaries might emerge by taking these idiosyncratic mishearings seriously within the historical contexts of multiple imperialisms and U.S. militarism? Through this speculative exercise, I am interested in exploring how mishearing, taken as a generative practice of sonic equivocation, enables the temporal and geographical otherwise that signals towards the south-south connections that were, that could have been, and could be.

About Abe

Marié Abe is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, her research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. Her publications include the ethnographic monograph Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan (2018, Wesleyan University Press) as well as a number of articles and chapters in journals and edited volumes including Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Popular Music, and the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music.

Public-facing work and performance are integral to Abe’s scholarship. She is committed to public ethnomusicology through curatorial practice, media, and community engagement. In 2008, Abe co-produced the Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio program “Squeezebox Stories,” an audio documentary on the social histories of the accordion in multicultural California, funded by the California Council for the Humanities. As a curator and artistic director, she founded and organized the BU Global Music Festival in Boston (2018–23), an annual music festival that is offered free of charge, open to the public, and accessible to all ages on the university campus. She firmly believes in equitable redistribution of resources from university campuses to artists and community members through fostering sustained relationships.

Marié holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology from Swarthmore College. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2023, Abe taught at Boston University (2011 to 2023) and Harvard University (2010 to 2011, 2016). She has held fellowships at the Reischauer Center for Japanese Studies, Harvard University (2010–11), the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College (2013–14), and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan (2018–19).