The Cultural Capital of Sound: Québécité's Acoustic Hybridity

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized world, marked by mass migration and diasporic displacement, it is becoming difficult to locate cultural community visuospatially. Since the scope of such community always already transgresses territorial borders, culture must, I argue, be decoupled from cartographic impulse. As auditory space, however, takes "[t]he universe [as its] potential map" (McLuhan 68), it seems a more productive means of thinking about cultural collectives. Indeed, cultural identifications and disarticulations might be resonant in music and oral discourse, though no longer coherently locatable in visual space. George Elliott Clarke's jazz opera Québécité foregrounds this sentiment, as its characters negotiate cultural community in sonic space and stage border-crossings acoustically. Further, these cross-cultural auralities are overlaid on a discursive background of Québec nationalism – a dialogue between federal and provincial interlocutors often enacted at the expense of the cultural Other, or 'third man.' In Québécité, however, a different kind of dialogue occurs; Clarke's 'Québécois(e) acoustic' exceeds the bilingual and approximates the multicultural.