“Port Noise”: Sense of Place and State Space in Dodge Cove

Chapter 3 explores noise abatement politics in the small community of Dodge Cove, BC. Beginning in 2007, the conversion of Prince Rupert’s Fairview Terminal into an intermodal container port has subjected settler residents in Dodge Cove to the abstract sounds and accelerating rhythms of economic globalization. It considers the bifurcated sensings and place attachments that would result, whereby residents would critique the abstract sounds of port expansion while valorizing fading bucolic sounds of nature. Building on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of state space and Mishuana Goeman’s settler grammars of place, chapter 3 argues that divergent attentional investments in noise/nature index a community’s increasingly tenuous claims to land. Instead of a “revolt of the living against abstraction,” perceptions of noise would tighten a community’s turn to its imagined bulwark of capitalist anesthetics, an elegiac settler sensing constitutive of its claims to place. It closes by finding in Dodge Cove an allegory of a doubled sonic forgetting: state space, and the coloniality upon which it operates.