Politics of Sound and Feeling
This paper discusses issues related to self-representation and expression in a Labrador Inuit community with reference to three locally-composed country-style songs frequently requested and played on the air by the community radio station. An under-discussed political impetus behind Raymond Williams’ « structures of feeling » helps redress a discursive imbalance that privileges « authentic » forms over Inuitized Euro-American ones. Measuring culture in terms of lived experience rather than discrete symbolic forms in the way Williams proposes is the basis for considering a substrate of affective continuities that persist even when more tangible forms erode or die out. Distinct Inuit affectivities that stick to non-Inuit musical forms are, in turn, circulated and shared via radio. In the resulting curated aural-affective radioscapes, a song’s affective potency is converted into structures of sonic feeling by reflexive interplays between individual and collective emotional subjectivities.