Sounding the masses: sonic collectivity and the politics of noise in Earl Lovelace's Salt

This paper argues that Earl Lovelace's Salt offers the sonic as a fundamental medium of identification, collectivity, and political mobility. The paper frames the novel within larger theoretical debates regarding the problematics of forming a collective political will that avoids the reductive tendencies inherited from colonial regimes. While much of this literature focuses on the need to create more meaningful categories of identification and representation, I argue that Lovelace veers the debate away from this drive toward meaning, and instead offers an alternative mode of identification and collectivity outside the domains of meaning - what I call a politics of unmeaning. That is, in crafting a mode of collectivity outside the regimes of meaning inherited from the shared legacies of colonialism and slavery, Lovelace seeks a significative and expressive material that performs Trinidadian subjectivity without fastening it to any particular narrative or paradigm - using noise as a central medium.