Undocumented Birds: Echopolitics as Interspecies Resistance

Abstract

Departing from the study of today’s populations of monk and ring-necked parakeets (endemic to South America and South Asia, respectively) inhabiting three Southern European cities – Athens, Madrid, and Lisbon –, this essay articulates together the tensions arising from their classification as invasive alien species with the transformation of these cities’ soundscapes. As different administrative bodies in Europe are preparing these birds’ population control through biopolitical management (i.e. extermination and sterilization), the cries and calls of these exotic birds speak loudly about the mutable nature of our environments, urban and otherwise. Difficulties of representing complex processes of environmental change entail the necessity for enacting modes of attention where noise-making and listening are tools that ready both humans and non-humans as noisy resistants to the enforced silencing brought on by late capitalist exploitation forms.