"The warrant said, 'Narcotics and kidnapping'/ 
Are you kidding? I make my money rapping/ 
You crooked cops need to stop it/ 
There are no kidnapping victims in my suit pockets"

Thus rhymed the Hip Hop artist Afroman in a parody of bumbling law enforcement officers who stormed his home in a fruitless raid. The officers sued Afroman for “derogatory” videos, seeking millions in damages, but the judge decided in favor of the rapper. As a long tradition of diss tracks, the dozens, and the political satire of calypso songs shows, the powers that be might intend to tightly control image but often find that subversive language, secret unspoken criticism, and the general transgressiveness of meaning that cannot be nailed down make sound a very slippery object of suppression. Yet courts more often ignore rap's performative and expressive qualities and double down on anti-Black racism by criminalizing it; in some cases, this has led to life sentences for minors (Lee; Kubrin/Nielson). 

The legal disciplining of rap is one instance of a larger cultural history where sound and the law intersect and that this panel explores in a comparative way, predominantly looking at—but not limited to—US empire and its afterlives. Papers from a range of fields and methodologies are invited such as performance studies, critical race theory, abolitionist frameworks, Afrofuturism, Indigenous studies, translation studies, museum studies, material culture. Analysis of settler colonial repression of languages and the practicing of culture because of sound’s capacity to carry knowledge and identity might be informed by, e.g., the anticolonial practices of Jessica Perea’s Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (2022), the spatial analysis and disability justice of Abigal Muchecheti’s Whiteness, Space, and the Architecture of Exclusion (2026), or the disruption of sonic control in Petal Samuel’s The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (2026). 

Critical inspirations and topics may include but are not limited to the following:

sound clash (Cooper)

fugitive listening (Brooks; Moten)

the sonic color line (Stoever)

hungry listening (Robinson)

Alexa & eavesdropping (Neville)

nation language (Brathwaite)

embodied archives, cultural memory & repertoire (Taylor)

sonic inauthenticity (Ramos)

#SayHerName

state apologies & relational listening

archival recordings of sacred song 

repatriation of aural collections 

Delgamuukw decision

First Nations lore, Murujuga Cultural Landscape & jinna

bornage 

oral testimony & boundary-marking (de Certeau)

discrepancies between treaties & Indigenous oral tradition

powwow ban 

residential school ban on Indigenous languages

bans on musical instruments 

steelpan as cultural survival

Young Thug & RICO

rap on trial (JM Harper)

PACE Act

Hip Hop culture as lens on law, racism, policing (Butler)

record label ownership of master recordings

sampling & copyright 

sorrow songs (Du Bois)

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

political genealogies of listening (Foucault)