The Call to Listen: A Cultural Phenomenon

This book considers the interplay of hearing, listening, and understanding in postcolonial Francophone literature and culture more broadly from North Africa and the Middle East. The call to listen—the cultural theory introduced in this book—is informed by the works of some of the most popular and critically acclaimed artists of the half-century following French decolonization: Algerian novelists Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Yasmina Khadra; Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad and avant-jazz trumpeter/visual artist Mazen Kerbaj; Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi; and Algerian Kabyle singer-songwriters and political activists Djura and Idir. These writers and artists have enjoyed great success not only in France but also with a global audience.

While sound and silence are the objects of inquiry in this book, the central question that drives this study takes a somewhat different tack: What compels us to listen? Why do some cultural works speak to so many, when there is a surfeit of choices in form and medium in contemporary global culture? From the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the predominant use of analog sound and radio shifted to the digital age. The digitized movement of media made cultural works (including literature, graphic novels, film, theatre, and music) and journalistic enterprises (first including newspapers, and eventually blogs, news aggregates, and social media) more accessible to the general public. The shift from analog recording and radio broadcasting to digital media allowed for a more efficient transmission of national and regional cultures, as well as the immediate transmission of historic events and cultural works. Gone are the days when the only stories one hears are passed directly from voice to ear, from generation to generation. Stories are mediated, on the page, the tablet, on mp3, or in digital video format. The choice of what kinds of stories to hear, and in what medium, feels infinite.

So how do we choose which stories to hear? For it is not simply media that has changed: the content of stories, and the storytellers themselves, have changed too. The evolution from analog to digital sound technologies took place alongside the social and political shifts from colonialism to globalization. One of the major cultural shifts to occur alongside these social and political changes has to do with who tells stories, and whose stories will be heard.