Public Talk / Alexandra Lippman - Sonic Sovereignty: Amplifying, Legislating, and Pacifying Funk in Rio de Janeiro

As Rio de Janeiro prepared to host the World Cup and the Olympics, how the city looked, felt, and sounded became a concern to the city and the nation. The over-the-top, sensory assault of the sound system dances, baile funk—which produce temporary, technophilic sovereignty in favelas that have been excluded, abandoned, and ignored by state—became an embarrassing problem for a city aesthetically preparing itself for foreign eyes (para inglés ver). Rio de Janeiro—with private and public funding connected to FIFA and the International Olympic Committee—began city-wide security project to pacify (pacificar) favelas through police and military “invasions” followed by the installation of 24/7 police presence. As police pacified favelas bringing them into the folds of the democratic state, they made their new control felt through silencing weekly bailes funk (funk dances) using dictatorship-era laws. Silencing the performance of contemporary Afrodiasporic electronic dance music made racialized power of the state visceral for favela residents. Funk musicians responded by creating a state law to recognize funk as culture embracing a text-based, liberal democratic approach towards controlling sound. By carefully attending to the regulation and production of funk in Rio, I show how controlling public sound—which I understand to include public affect, sentiment, and the senses—is central to sovereignty, power, and the production of difference.