Freedom & Captivity: The Soundscape of American Hyperincarceration

Dr. Andrew McGraw (University of Richmond) situates the Richmond, Virginia city jail within the highly racialized context of contemporary American hyperincarceration and describes the ways in which the sounds of suffering were muted in the transition from the old city jail to a new, “cutting edge” facility in 2014. McGraw discusses the music that residents have produced in both facilities and concludes by arguing that the contemporary jail is only one component of several interlocking structures that sonically segregates Richmond’s majority African American population from its minority Anglo-American population. Studying carceral soundscapes represents a political intervention by bringing into the public auditorium the sounds of suffering that have been muted both within and without penal institutions. 

Andrew McGraw is an associate professor of music at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He is the author of Radical Traditions: Reimagining Culture in Balinese Experimental Music (Oxford 2013) and Music as Ethics (forthcoming on Oxford 2022). He has co-edited two volumes on Indonesian music: Performing Indonesia, with Sumarsam (Smithsonian 2014) and Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music, with Chris Miller (forthcoming on Cornell 2022). He has published numerous articles music and ethics as well as analytical pieces on temporality in Balinese, Javanese, and Cuban musics. In Richmond he facilitates community gamelan and kroncong ensembles, and runs a music program in the Richmond City Jail. 

Freedom & Captivity is a coalition-based state-wide public humanities initiative to bring critical perspectives from the humanities to the interrogation of incarceration. Recognizing that mass incarceration is fueled by racism and profit-generating mechanisms that tear apart communities and families, the project offers opportunities to educate the public about benefits of prison abolition and the redirection of resources toward community investments, the repair of racial and gender injustice, intergenerational trauma, and eldercare for the aging population in Maine’s prisons. The project, which includes art exhibitions, workshops, webinars, a podcast, documentary projects, and linked courses taught across Maine’s campuses, aims to cultivate opportunities for imagining freedom in an abolitionist society. The project is conceived with the participation of people in Maine directly impacted by the carceral system. 

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