Audible Geographies in Latin America examines the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon. It argues that place is not just a geographical or political notion, but also a sensorial one, shaped by the specific profile of the senses engaged through different media. Through a series of cases, the book examines racialized listening criteria and practices in the formation of ideas about place at exemplary moments between the 1890s and the 1960s. Through a discussion of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s last concerts in Rio de Janeiro, and a contemporary sound installation involving telegraphs by Otávio Schipper and Sérgio Krakowski, Chapter 1 proposes a link between a sensorial economy and a political economy for which the racialized and commodified body serves as an essential feature of its operation. Chapter 2 analyzes resonance as a racialized concept through an examination of phonograph demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and research on dancing manias and hypnosis in Salvador da Bahia in the 1890s. Chapter 3 studies voice and speech as racialized movements, informed by criminology and the proscriptive norms defining “white” Spanish in Cuba. Chapter 4 unpacks conflicting listening criteria for an optics of blackness in “national” sounds, developed according to a gendered set of premises that moved freely between diaspora and empire, national territory and the fraught politics of recorded versus performed music in the early 1930s. Chapter 5, in the context of Cuban Revolutionary cinema of the 1960s, explores the different facets of noise—both as a racialized and socially relevant sense of sound and as a feature and consequence of different reproduction and transmission technologies. Overall, the book argues that these and related instances reveal how sound and listening have played more prominent roles than previously acknowledged in place-making in the specific multi-ethnic, colonial contexts characterized by diasporic populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Audible Geographies in Latin America examines the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon. It argues that place is not just a geographical or political notion, but also a sensorial one, shaped by the specific profile of the senses engaged through different media. Through a series of cases, the book examines racialized listening criteria and practices in the formation of ideas about place at exemplary moments between the 1890s and the 1960s. Through a discussion of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s last concerts in Rio de Janeiro, and a contemporary sound installation involving telegraphs by Otávio Schipper and Sérgio Krakowski, Chapter 1 proposes a link between a sensorial economy and a political economy for which the racialized and commodified body serves as an essential feature of its operation. Chapter 2 analyzes resonance as a racialized concept through an examination of phonograph demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and research on dancing manias and hypnosis in Salvador da Bahia in the 1890s. Chapter 3 studies voice and speech as racialized movements, informed by criminology and the proscriptive norms defining “white” Spanish in Cuba. Chapter 4 unpacks conflicting listening criteria for an optics of blackness in “national” sounds, developed according to a gendered set of premises that moved freely between diaspora and empire, national territory and the fraught politics of recorded versus performed music in the early 1930s. Chapter 5, in the context of Cuban Revolutionary cinema of the 1960s, explores the different facets of noise—both as a racialized and socially relevant sense of sound and as a feature and consequence of different reproduction and transmission technologies. Overall, the book argues that these and related instances reveal how sound and listening have played more prominent roles than previously acknowledged in place-making in the specific multi-ethnic, colonial contexts characterized by diasporic populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"This book tells readers: tracing the classical music networks that Cuban composers cultivated between 1940 and 1991 through examining compositions, ensembles, and cultural institutions with a microhistorical approach. It sets the foundation for investigating how aesthetics and politics intersected in the case studies explored throughout the book: individual points of view largely determined the degree to which composers engaged in various local and international artistic networks; and these networks were constantly being nurtured and shaped by their actors, who also had to contend with national and global political and economic circumstances. This chapter provides readers with working definitions of key concepts: modernism, avant-garde, experimentalism, and vanguardia. Key figures Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier and their contributions to the intellectual milieu that Cuban composers inhabited -especially the concepts of transculturation and lo real maravilloso, respectively-are also discussed. It contextualizes the book within existing scholarship on 20th-century classical music of the Americas, Eastern Europe, and the Cold War, as well as those dealing with Cuban music and Cuban studies more broadly"--

In this book, author Martin Munro offers a new path into Caribbean studies based on sound. He argues that to understand and begin to transform the past, present, and future of Caribbean studies, historians must do so at the node of both sound and vision. It is a transnational, multidisciplinary study that will interest anyone who knows or wishes to learn about the Caribbean.

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.