top of page

Listening Sonic Modernity in Latin America

Soundscapes, Aftersounds, and Phonographies                                                     Laguna, Abreu, eds.

  • Theorizations of Latin American modernity through the production, reception or dissemination of sound.

  • Music as a laboratory for experimentations in modernity.

  • The exploration of sounds that resurrect hidden colonial strata. 

  • The emergence of memories of suffering through sound. 

  • Sound projects of indigenous self-determination. 

  • The violence within the soundscapes of colonial and modern Latin America and its pervasiveness in the present.

  • Mapping sound and sonic experiences in the archives.

  • The relationship of the aesthetics of music and the contexts of its consumption.

  • Voices of resistance to the media’s neoliberal grip on the increasingly globalized modern nation-state.

  • Sonic circulation in Latin America and the role of periodicals and memories in the construction of sonic canons.

  • The sounds of the “transnationalization of the Black condition” as a constitutive moment for modernity (Mbembe).

  • Thinking beyond the ocularcentrism of racial discourse to start building projects of hearing through race.

  • Sonic racial archaeologies in the constitution of modern national subjects. 

  • If as Jonathan Sterne has suggested there was an “Ensoniment” simultaneous to the Enlightenment, what are the “conjunctures among ideas, institutions and practices [that] rendered the world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening” in Latin America?

  • The fluid transnational practices of music forms that are no longer inherently tied to particular ethnic groups (Hesmondhalgh and Negus): i.e. Latino punk as a way of resistance that strengthens emotional bonds and sense of neighborhood belonging in South Central and East Los Angeles. 

  • The maneuvers between reason, resonance, and space as polyphonic trajectories in the emergence of modernity (Erlmann).

  • The use of mass communication technologies as instruments of sonic modernization and deployment of nation building soundscapes.

  • The transformation of sound technologies from an instrument of colonial civilization into a voice of subaltern agency.

  • Forms of aural dissidence: i.e. Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling against the U.S. national anthem as a symbol of oppression and subjugation.

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL 

September 8, 2018

Inquiries: sonicmodernity@gmail.com

bottom of page