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Kautschukmelodie: Blood Rubber, Epistemic Murk, Song Properties
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Kautschukmelodie: Blood Rubber, Epistemic Murk, Song Properties
This chapter analyzes the relation between sound and rubber, in relation to the Atlantic rubber trade, from around 1867 to 1890. This chapter’s aim is to go beyond the Latourian invitation to “follow the actors,” in order to track political ecologies of rubber in musical instruments, gramophones, or telegraph systems. The chapter also examines how aesthetic ideas about musical elasticity, elastic tempi, and elastic concepts of manipulable sound were beholden to that rapidly expanding colonial trade. Finally, this chapter revisits the concept of “extraction,” musical as much as material: the rubber boom in the Amazon linked to the Hanseatic rubber exchange linked to telegraph systems laid in the Atlantic—and the article’s title refers to Eduard Pechuël-Loesche’s descriptions of the “rubber-melodies” of Vili-speaking peoples on the Loango coast of West Central Africa.
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