October 17, 2025 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 4th floor
How To Touch Silence
Yun Emily Wang
Assistant Professor of Music and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Duke University
This talk considers the limits of both “sound” and “studies” by thinking with Vietnamese American poet Diana Khoi Nguyen’s performances of silence in her anthology Ghost Of (2018), which chronicles her grief for a brother lost to suicide. Drawing from published interviews and my own conversations with Nguyen, I analyze Nguyen’s vocalization of silence in public readings and in her multimedia work. I situate Nguyen’s own theoretical thinking at the intersection between sound studies and Asian American studies, and posit her poetics of silence as a critical form of generosity (and indeed, love) grounded in the willingness to not know. Silence holds space for the violence woven into the fabric of her family, but also opens possibilities for life otherwise. Nguyen invites her audience to touch, rather than to listen to/for/through, the silence. In so doing, I suggest, she also prompts us to rethink the ethics of listening.
About Yun Emily Wang
Yun Emily Wang is Assistant Professor of Music and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Emily is an ethnographer of sound, music, and listening who likes to think with transnational Asian/Asian American studies and queer and feminist thought, and is broadly interested in how aural subjectivities are (de)formed by—and expressive of—difference as a relational modality. Her first book traces otherwise modes of listening in everyday life among Chinese immigrants under Canadian liberal multiculturalism, and consider the queer ways of being such listening enables. Their second project asks how silence and quietude hold space for Taiwan’s unspeakable counterhistories. Emily has publications in or forthcoming from Ethnomusicology, Women and Music (for which she currently serves as a co-editor), Resonance, City & Society, and American Music, among others. Her work has been recognized by prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for Asian Music, and the Society for Queer Asian Studies. Emily plays the Chinese two-stringed spike fiddle (erhu), but only with a critical distance.