Benjamin Tausig’s research focuses on protests which he analyses through sound. In his publication Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint he analyses the Red Shirt movement through field recording. For Nameless. echoes, specters, hisses, Tausig shares a recording of chanting in Ratchaprasong, Bangkok, on the 13th of June 2010, the epicenter of recent violence against protesters. In the recording, protesters are chanting a phrase thîi nîi mii khon taay which could be translated as ‘people died here’ or ‘there are dead people here’. The Thai phrase is malleable and lends an ambiguity in which the presence of the dead can be construed: there are literally dead bodies there and their specters are still haunting the intersection. The chant also acted as a deliberate haunting of the space by the announcement of the past.

Tausig will provide this field recording as well as a 1000 words essay reflecting on this particular chant, contextualising it within the tactics of protest by drawing from Butlerian writings on announcing oneself as well as delving into notions of the opacity of protest. This piece will shed light on this historical event and will open the thinking towards political struggles in general by linking it to other movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Benjamin Tausig is an Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University. He teaches sound studies and ethnomusicology whilst researching sound and dissent in Southeast Asia. His current research consists of the musical intimacies of Thailand during the Vietnam War, including the largely-forgotten American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, who lived in Bangkok for fifteen years. He is also looking at the ways that music and nightlife were at the center of Thailand’s semi-colonial development from the 1950s through the 1970s. He published the book Bangkok is Ringing in 2019 with Oxford University Press.