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[REVIEW] “Hearing the Pandemic: Sound, State, and Care in Christina Schwenkel’s Sonic Socialism” by Hantian Zhang

Christina Schwenkel. Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, University of California Press, 2025. 226 pgs.

There is much to admire in Christina Schwenkel’s Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, a timely account of, and scholarly intervention into, the pandemic from a comparatively overlooked location, Vietnam, and through an undertheorised sensory register, the auditory.

… arguing instead that what she terms “disaster socialism” proved more effective than “disaster capitalism” during the pandemic.

Having experienced much of the pandemic in Hanoi herself and impressed by the Vietnamese government’s success in controlling the spread of the virus, the American anthropologist writes the book, in part, to push back against Western media’s knee-jerk labels such as “authoritarianism”, arguing instead that what she terms “disaster socialism” proved more effective than “disaster capitalism” during the pandemic. Although this contrast is drawn more sharply in the book than in reality, the effort itself continues anthropology’s long-standing tradition of challenging received assumptions.

When it comes to the book’s principal subject, namely how the Vietnamese state managed COVID-19, especially through its sonic dimension, clear-cut dichotomies give way to nuanced analysis. To follow Schwenkel’s experience of COVID-19 in Vietnam, organised into three chapters (or “acts”) centred on quarantine, lockdown, and social distancing, is to survey the field of sound studies and to appreciate how this rich body of scholarship illuminates the complexities of lived experience during the pandemic, the changing acoustic environment, and the shifting nature and contexts of listening. The book’s central premise, that COVID-19 can be understood primarily not as a visual or epidemiological phenomenon but as a sonic one, is genuinely original. Schwenkel asks what the pandemic sounded like and how sound became a medium through which states organised care while exercising discipline.

The proposition that the pandemic not only generated “social, temporal, and material disruptions to everyday life” but also produced a “radical sensory disorientation, one that compels new ways of being in, caring for, and attuning to our urban worlds through sounds” (p. 7) opens up a wide-ranging interpretation of the pandemic informed by sound theory. At the onset of the pandemic, the state practised “sounding discipline”, whereby urban loudspeakers formed a panaudicon that asserted the state’s regime of control and care, extending a legacy of “socialist sounding” in which loudspeakers functioned as political instruments for “making and imagining” society. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s concept of the “sonic colour lines” is invoked to denote “[w]ho listens, how, and to what we attune our ears”, thereby marking a site where “critical questions about power, privilege, and the voices considered worthy of being heard” arise (p. 81). Here, sound and listening acquire unmistakable political significance. This political dimension is further developed through J. Martin Daughtry’s concept of “sonic campaigns”, which describes the “dynamic and often violent relationship between sounding and listening as emplaced and embodied experience within ‘inherently combative soundscapes’” (p. 78). One particularly memorable example comes from a retired grandmother who credited the loudspeakers with increasing her productivity in unpaid household labour, illustrating how a sonic perspective can unexpectedly reveal the pandemic’s exacerbation of gender inequalities.

Pandemic temporalities are likewise marked by sound. As loudspeaker broadcasts became shorter, less frequent, and less urgent, other sounds signalling a return to normality emerged. The author herself also ventured beyond the confines of her home, introducing a tripartite framework for understanding the spectrum and spatiotemporal patterns of sound, biophony, geophony, and anthrophony, to characterise the acoustic environment she encountered while walking around a Hanoi lake. She documents these encounters in a sound map, indeed a sonic archive, that amplifies soundmarks typically excluded from conventional cartography. In doing so, the sound map challenges the state’s authority to determine the sounding of public space.

Such descriptions can, at times, become overly theory-laden, slowing the pace of the narrative and crowding out the ethnographic material. Some sections move rapidly from an observation to a succession of theoretical citations, leaving empirical scenes only partially developed. In these instances, rather than allowing readers to dwell in the material, theoretical interlocutors interrupt the unfolding of the ethnography. At times, the book’s theoretical claims also exceed the strength of its empirical demonstrations. For example, Schwenkel argues that “the primary model for cultivating ‘moral citizenship’ at the time was not visual, but auditory” (p. 77). Although the ethnography convincingly demonstrates the importance of sound in Vietnam’s pandemic response, it provides less evidence for the stronger comparative claim that auditory media displaced visual forms as the dominant mode of governance. Ironically, the book opens with the viral song “Ghen Cô Vy”, whose effectiveness underscores the visual dimension of the state’s anti-viral campaign, since the accompanying video necessarily engaged both sensory registers.

The book is likewise self-conscious about the relative thinness of its informant-based evidence, presenting itself throughout as an “autoethnography”. Indeed, insofar as personal experience is foregrounded, the experiential centre of gravity remains the ethnographer herself rather than sustained engagement with particular interlocutors. Although this represented an understandable methodological adaptation under pandemic conditions, the book elevates that necessity into a broader methodological claim through its repeated invocation of “autoethnography”. Such a first-person orientation nevertheless limits sustained engagement with the perspectives of local interlocutors. Furthermore, although one’s own experience constitutes legitimate ethnographic data for illuminating broader cultural processes, the book’s principal objects of analysis, including state media, loudspeakers, public campaigns, neighbourhood practices, and urban soundscapes, are only partially accessible through personal experience alone. Even under pandemic conditions, what does autoethnography make possible that reflexive ethnography, supplemented by participant observation and whatever interviews were feasible, could not?

These limitations notwithstanding, Sonic Socialism remains an outstanding contribution because of its distinctive focus and rich theoretical engagement. At a time when the visual increasingly dominates our perception, Sonic Socialism demonstrates how attending to sound can reveal dimensions of social and political life that might otherwise remain unheard.

^{How to cite: Zhang, Hantian. “Hearing the Pandemic: Sound, State, and Care in Christina Schwenkel’s Sonic Socialism.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 10 Aug. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/08/10/sonic-socialism.}

Hantian Zhang‘s writing has appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco, where he works as a data scientist by day.