we’ve all, we’ve done: sounding a Korean adoptee archive

Jones, Bonnie B.

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Overview

Year:: 2022
Contributor:: Jones, Bonnie B (creator); Greenlee, Shawn (Reader); Wang, Lu (Advisor); Osborn, Edward (Reader); Brown University. Music: Computer Music and Multimedia Composition (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Electronic music; Sound installations (Art); Intercountry adoption; Sound art; Research--Archival resources
Extent:: 6, 84 p.

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Description

Abstract:: “we’ve all, we’ve done” is a multisensory, multidisciplinary, sound art installation that is a research creation project that presents personal and historical archival materials about the Korean War and the consequences of transnational and transracial adoption. It is a story about stories and how we tell those stories. How we transform those stories so that they no longer define us within the confines of tragedy and loss. This essay proposes two ways of negotiating and improvising with the archive of the adoptee, through “counter-listening” and “sounding.” Counter-listening is an aural equivalent to a counter-narrative. It is both an action and a result. The adoptee archive requires counter-intuitive methods of listening to its stories. It requires hearing past the stories of the “Western savior,” the “hopeless orphan,” the “broken” adult who will be forever haunted by the cultural loss and inability to form a consistent identity. A corollary to counter-listening to the archive is a practice of sounding through performance of the archive. Sounding confronts material history with an improvisational intervention that allow us to know the archive and its subjects in new ways through multisensory engagements with its materials. Weaving together the thinking of feminist scholars and artists like Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and transnational adoptee scholars Eleana J Kim, Arissa Oh, Mark Jerng, and others, this essay describes “we’ve all, we’ve done” and its alternative, creative, methods of presenting an archival research creation project and the broader, geopolitical, history of transnational adoption in which it exists.
Notes:: Thesis (A. M.)--Brown University, 2022

Content

Citation

Jones, Bonnie B., "we’ve all, we’ve done: sounding a Korean adoptee archive" (2022). Computer Music and Multimedia Composition Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:9r723yee/

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Computer Music and Multimedia Composition Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Computer Music and Multimedia Composition department.
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