Sonic Decoloniality: Listening, Orality, and Epistemic Disobedience in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Discourse on the Logic of Language

Abstract

This study establishes a decolonial linguistic framework to examine the sonic form of poetic discourse in a qualitative and interpretive analysis of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Discourse on the Logic of Language (1989/1997). Current scholarship has read the poem as a critique of colonial language and epistemic violence, but little has been explored about the poem’s sonic architecture as a decolonial place of knowledge production. To fill this gap, the poem’s sound patterns of stutter, repetition, phonetic mutation and vocal fragmentation are each engaged as epistemic interventions that question colonial logocentrism and literacy centered authority. The study introduces the notion of sonic decoloniality, inspired by decolonial theory, language ideology studies, and recent scholarship on sonic epistemology, as a means to conceptualize the acoustic disruption as a form of resistance against classificatory linguistics and colonial rationality. This study shows through close qualitative reading, that sound engages with alternative memory processes, embodied transmission and anti-fluency politics to reposition knowledge as relational and corporeal. The analysis also explores the poem’s edicts and medical taxonomy where colonial classification is parodied and subverted, drawing structural analogies with decolonial critiques of metadata and description standards in archives. By analogy, the results extend decolonial linguistics into decolonial archiving, positioning listening and alternative memory practices as heuristic resources for community-controlled heritage governance.

Keywords: Decolonial Linguistics, Sonic Poetics, Language Ideology, Acoustic Resistance, Alternative Memory, Listening as Method, Decolonial Archiving.