Description
Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond is the first extensive study of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain or elsewhere in colonial Latin America. In the New Spanish context, Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico attends to Afro-descendant sonorities through a filter of percussion. This framework remixes Jacques Derrida’s reading of the ear’s anatomy as antithetical to the philosophical voice with Afrosonic theories like Gilroy’s lower frequencies or Fred Moten’s phonic materiality. Its aim is to unsettle the divide between self and other so the auditory archive might emerge as a polyphonic record that exceeds dichotomies of sounding object/listening subject. Armed with percussive headphones and a historical DJ mindset, Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico samples Afro-descendant sounds in the archive in order to amplify Black subjectivities from New Spain. It seeks to recover and rearticulate Afro-descendant voices and auditory practices in New Spain. As scholars like Gary Tomlinson, Ana MarÍa Ochoa Gautier and Kathryn de Luna have shown, Western writing is a limited mode for capturing non-European sounds in the early Americas.
Book Information
ISBN 9780826506856
Author Sarah Finley
Format Hardback
Page Count 296
Imprint Vanderbilt University Press
Publisher Vanderbilt University Press