Joanne Leow lives as a guest on Treaty Six Territory and the homeland of the Métis. She is Assistant Professor of decolonizing, diasporic, and transnational literatures at the University of Saskatchewan. Her most recent research is in positions: asia critique, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. Her ecocritical SSHRC-funded project “Intertidal Polyphonies” is archived at intertidal.usask.ca.
How might one convey the colonial legacies and ongoing ecological impact of development in Singapore and Hong Kong? In this paper, I examine how my creation of a decolonial, digital archive of sound recordings, artist and writer interviews and readings, video clips, and short films attempts to wrestle with the hyper-development of these two Asian cities. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant from Canada, “Intertidal Polyphonies” seeks to explore new aspects of the environmental humanities in Asia, and develop public-facing critique and scholarship about these spaces. In particular, I consider what roles collaboration, sound, and polyphony might play in the affective depiction of Asian cities in flux, connecting Singapore and Hong Kong in profound yet unexpected ways. My work turns to sound, resonance, listening, and acoustemology as ways in which to understand these deep traces of intertidal histories, development, and infrastructure but also to communicate them to a larger audience. I seek to theorize the assemblage of recordings that I have made of the acoustic realities of sand dredging, construction, tides, and changing ecosystems. How best as well to consider the voices of the writers and artists working in these contexts? “Intertidal Polyphonies” draws from a theorization of sound as both a framework and a methodology for inquiry and knowledge mobilization. Jacques Attali (1977) muses that “more than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies” (6). Indeed, he posits that “the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but it is audible” (3). Numerous scholars like Jean-Luc Nancy (2002) and Veit Erlmann (2010) have written about the singularity and power of sound to transcend time and space while paradoxically grounding the listener in place. Further, writing about an assemblage-ecological sense of sound, Georgina Born (2019) notes how sound has “is both coproduced nonhumanly… yet also transubstantiates perceptually, affectively, and culturally into human experience… [and] acts on the human rather than merely being modulated by the human” (187). While these theorizations have arisen from Euro-American contexts, recent work by Rey Chow and Pooja Rangan (2019) has opened the way to consider how much more needs to be done in terms of contextualizing and understanding the possibilities of inter-Asian work in sound recordings and objects.