Listening to White Supremacy on Trial

Public Culture · 2026-04-27

Audio‐Visibility in a Guinean Trial: Sexual Justice and the Procès 28 Septembre

PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2025-05-31 · 1 citations

ABSTRACT What does it mean to be audible and visible before the law and the public? Whose rights are preeminent? Who decides? In this article, I examine two moments of testimony from rape victim–witnesses in a high‐profile criminal trial in the Republic of Guinea. The Procès du massacre du 28 septembre 2009 was a case against an ex‐Guinean president and members of his regime, charged with orchestrating mass political and sexual violence in 2009. The case was televised from the start, but victims of sexual assault were granted the right to testify privately. While the principle of open justice holds that trials should be accessible to the public and transparent for defendants’ rights, certain witnesses may find such exposure risky. Audiovisual technologies in the courts have raised the stakes around these choices of open justice and protective measures. Victim‐witnesses attempt to manage their audio‐visibility as they negotiate between publicity and privacy in real time, working out what it means to be audible and visible in and as a pursuit of sexual justice.

Rape survivors like Gisèle Pelicot are choosing to speak out, refuting the idea that they should feel shame

2024-12-03 · 1 citations

Introduction

Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2022-12-01 · 1 citations

This Forum brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who reflect with us about our film-in-progress, Big Mouth, about defamation, sexual violence, and advocacy in Guinea. In this introductory essay, we lay out the complex constellation of events, people, and questions that animate the film. We also introduce the central themes of justice claims and evidence that inspire and tie together our respective contributions to Hau. In this regard, we ask what role ethnography and filmmaking might serve. While video is increasingly used as a form of evidence in legal proceedings, what is its potential as a form of intervention outside of the courtroom? How can film resist the binary thinness of political discourse and legal practice by instead exploring the sensorial experiences of justice claims and aspirations? Collectively, we think beyond formal legal approaches to evidence and testimony and instead towards more expansive and everyday modes of witnessing and practices of testifying, naming, and shame.

The tone of justice

Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2022 · 2 citations

• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Linguistics

Social and legal disputes around sexual violence commonly involve a pattern in which those alleged to have committed violence instead portray themselves as victims, often successfully so. As part of the Forum on evidence and ambiguity in the Big Mouth film project, this article explores the process of legal and everyday persuasion involved in reinforcing this narrative of victimhood. In the events in Big Mouth, the survivor and her advocates film, broadcast, argue, and plead to convince others of the harm done to her, while the perpetrator repeatedly claims his own injury, including through a retaliatory lawsuit against the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah. Focusing on the perpetrator’s assertion of his own victimhood, I consider how such claims are voiced and how they interact with existing ways of listening, to perpetrators and to survivors. I draw attention to sound and listening to examine the performance of claims and the strategies by which parties in a dispute are rendered varyingly audible or inaudible to the law and the public at large.

Big mouth: amplified feminism in Guinea

Sound Studies · 2022-11-24 · 2 citations

In January 2019, the Guinean journalist and feminist activist, Moussa Yéro Bah, was found guilty in a defamation suit. The suit involved a clip on her radio news program, in which she spoke about an ongoing rape case. While she never named the alleged perpetrator, his identity was well known on the street and in social media. He promptly sued Ms. Bah, and won. In this article, I explore this case and activists’ reactions to it, to consider how voice, sound, and listening shape responses to sexual violence. I examine the role of amplification in feminist struggles for gender justice in Guinea and analyse the sound effects of a series of vocal interventions by activists and journalists. My analysis explores how vocal practices, audio technologies, and ways of hearing shape both legal and extra-legal proceedings. As I show, activists strategically sound out their claims in everyday spaces in order to bypass the failures of formal legal systems and create possibilities for more collective, transformative action.

Review: <i>Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World</i>, by Mark Katz

Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2021-03-01

In his new book Build, Mark Katz provides a rich account of the people, histories, problems, and successes around the U.S. State Department's use of hip hop as a diplomatic tool. Katz served as director of the government's hip hop diplomacy initiative, Next Level, from 2013 to 2018 and traveled around the world meeting artists and participating in events. These experiences and his sharp observations and thoughtful reflections about them provide for an engaging exploration of what hip hop means to so many people, from so many backgrounds, and in so many places. While the book attempts to make the case for both hip hop and diplomacy, and to make a clear bridge between the two, it is most successful when it focuses on the art form and the artists, for whom Katz clearly has deep admiration. As he sees time and time again, for countless young people across the globe, the music matters because "hip hop saved my life" (6).

Sexual Violence and the Politics of Forgiveness in Guinea

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies

Abstract This chapter examines the limits of musical activism by considering some of the varied ways in which music has addressed women’s rights and gender-based violence in Guinea. It centers around the case of a young Guinean rapper who was recently charged with sexual assault, and whose case generated intense criticism from feminist activists and intense support from his fans. The chapter considers two songs closely connected to the case: one that calls for an end to violence against women, and one that calls on women to forgive him. These two songs seem to reflect radically divergent views on gender-based violence. But they are both linked to an underlying ambivalence about women’s rights on the behalf of musicians, audiences, and the state. Survivors of sexual violence are absent in both cases, erased by a politics of forgiveness that calls on them to forget and to be forgotten.

Becoming militant: embodying the Guinean revolution and Guinea–China relations

Africa · 2020 · 1 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies

Abstract This article considers the role of embodied experience in promoting revolutionary ideology in Guinea. The Republic of Guinea has long held close ties with China, and in the 1960s and 1970s the country pursued its own Cultural Revolution. While Chinese songs and aesthetics had little direct artistic influence, the Guinean state embraced Maoist ideals of social and self-transformation and discipline. Such ideals were translated into daily life through the regulation of bodies, including practices of dance, movement and physical gesture that sought to create revolutionary subjects. I show here how embodied practices, including the circulation of dancers and official delegations, cultivated Guinea's relationship with China; and how practices of movement and dance were inwardly experienced within Guinea during its own Cultural Revolution. In so doing, I address some of the contradictions of the Revolution and of Guinea–China relations. While the regime pursued its goals through violence and brutality, former revolutionary subjects today remember the moment for both its pain and its pleasures – for the hardships the body had to endure and for the nationalist pride that many still feel today.

The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea

2019-10-02 · 15 citations