India Song’s politics of sound

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article approaches questions of race and imperialism in India Song through the film’s strategies of sound. Departing from the notion that Duras’s relegation to the soundtrack of certain aspects of the film’s colonial context might be read as a means to avoid the totalising risks of the image, this article suggests that, in the film, sound is deployed not only as a means of survival for the non-white subject but also as a site of political agency and a space in which to forge tentative forms of community. As the film’s use of language intersects with questions of power and resistance, India Song imagines models of political enunciation which avoid the semiotic privilege of the signifier and thus challenge the violence of hegemonic language in the colonial context. Thus, as the film uses sound to imagine new ways of being public without the risk of visual capture, noise emerges as an opaque site of connection and enunciation beyond the demand for recognition and legibility upon which logos is predicated.