Description
Building on the concept of sound as a technology for continuity—or "sontinuity" (Elbaz, 2024)—I interrogate, through two case-studies of late Ottoman Sephardi voices, whether the visual and sonic features of language constitute the foundation of that continuity, beyond underlying ideas, texts, or thoughts. Does a specifically Sephardi epistemology emerge from the interplay between multilingual and multi "graphospheric" (Franklin, 2019) visual and auditory modes of knowledge transmission? Using examples from late 19th and early 20th century Istanbul and Jerusalem and engaging with Gilroy's theorisation of "same difference" (2000), a sounded Sephardi graphosphere begins to appear. Such an inquiry may shed light on the relationship between visual working memory and attention (Werner, Einhäuser and Hortsmann, 2013), eminently present in the practice of Sephardi oral transmission until today, offering key insights into multilingual sonic negotiations of the Sephardi ontological self. Integrating archival, ethnographic and phenomenological methodologies, Glissant's poetics of relation (1990) precipitate us towards the fragility and strength of minority self through sound.
