Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi the reader encounters a discussion of social distancing not merely as a public health measure, but as an ethical gesture— a public expression of care that shaped how people interacted with one another within reconfigured sensory environments. Marking the beginning of Act 3, this page explores the careful calibration of the relationship between “safe” distance and proximity, particularly through heightened attention to the sonic dimensions of epidemiological risk. It outlines how listening itself changed, as people attuned more deeply to coughs and sneezes that provoked new registers of anxiety, transforming connections to both the urban environment and the bodies moving through it.

This discussion emerges at a pivotal transition in the book. The chapter shifts from the end of a three-week lockdown in Hanoi (Act 2) to a different form of pandemic governance, from enforced isolation to cautious social reintegration with an emphasis on spatial distancing, as it was called in Vietnam. This also marked a reopening of the domestic economy following containment of the virus by April 2020, while much of the world remained closed. Page 99 examines how this shift in governance materialized in daily life, transforming everyday sensory experience through both spatial and sonic interventions. For example, outside commercial establishments, material markings on the ground designated two-meter distances (“stand here”), while bullhorns provided auditory reminders to keep apart. People also created their own protective boundaries to mitigate the risk of viral transmission. Market vendors—particularly women—used tape to cordon off their stalls to ensure customers transacted from a safe distance. Though a photograph of this practice originally appeared on page 99, I removed it when the tape proved too faint to see clearly.

Page 99 thus captures a particular moment in pandemic time when anxieties about viral transmission in Hanoi ran high. A COVID poem featured here reflects concerns about cross-contamination, as well as the dread of being publicly identified through contact tracing in the press. This vigilance would soon wane, however. Later in Act 3, with no reported contagion, people began to lose their fear and test the boundaries of state control. In this way, page 99 marks a specific point in the acoustic and affective rhythms at the heart of this sensory autoethnography, as they ebbed and flowed across 2020.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue