Sounds from the South

Inspired by the Deleuzian imperative to think with, rather than of, cinema, this article considers Mediterranean musics less in terms of historical and cultural testimony and more as an ongoing composition of a mobile critical syntax. The southern and subaltern sounds that are heard and registered permit travel in the musical archive and there configure a critical cartography that continually exceeds and interrogates habitual understandings imposed by national boundaries and limited linguistic communities. Ultimately these sounds come to chart the limits of a modernity, and its framing of the Mediterranean, that turns out not to be merely ours to control and define.