Abstract

This article examines some of the ways in which Black and Brown young women and men within the context of the US are consistently confronted by the silences around state-sanctioned violence enacted on our bodies with impunity while even our playful sonoric outbursts are reconfigured as threats to the state. I argue that, different from Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation where the refrain functions to keep chaos at bay, the refrain produced by a group of Black and Brown youth at a ferry station in New York brings to the fore and into confrontation the very Codes that create a sense of ‘home’ and ‘security’ for some at the expense of their well-being and often lives. However it is from navigating, what I refer to as, silent chaos that this article seeks to explore the decolonial potential of the sonoric ‘disruptions' produced by these Black and Brown young women and men, in particular by examining how they challenge the status quo and highlight the urgent need for new systems of valuation that would serve to reconstitute their collective worth.