Invitation to Contribute to Edited Volume on Latinx Sound Studies
Editors: D. Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara V. Hinojos
We enthusiastically invite you to be part of an edited volume on Latinx Sound Studies! We seek scholarly contributions engaging sound, aurality, and acoustemologies within largely working-class, migrant, and racialized Latinx communities. The volume will think broadly about Latinx sonic engagements, attending to social and spatial mobility, transgressive and transformative modes of sounding and listening, and decolonizing listening methodologies.
Recent Sound Studies collections by Steingo and Skyes (2019) and Radical Sounds Latin America (2020, 2021) have advanced an alternate center of gravity towards the Global South and away from the hegemony of Global North listening. These works have been pivotal in “emerging” and broadening the scholarly soundscape. However, folks already engaged in thinking through the sonic ways of knowing and being in the world of U.S. subaltern and diasporic Latinx people (about 20% of the current U.S. population) are yet to be recognized as a distinct gravitational center in Sound Studies. We posit that our listening is not positioned entirely in a North or South sensibility but is a hybrid of indigenous, border(ed), and itinerant subjectivity that offers a distinct and unique entry into sound.
The transgressive form of Latinx subjectivity through sound has been documented to some extent. Seminal works in the field yet named Latinx Sound Studies include Américo Paredes (1958) and Maria Herrera-Sobek’s (1990) homages on storytelling and borderland corridos; the Latina Feminist Group’s groundbreaking Telling to Live (2001)defining the oral/aural epistemology of testimonios; and Frances Aparicio (1998) and Alexandra T. Vasquez’s (2013) research on listeners’ engagement with salsa from which subsequent scholars have drawn to theorize Latinx sonic engagements. More recently, Dolores Inés Casillas (2014), Sonia Robles (2019) and Monica De La Torre (2022) revamped the long-neglected field of Spanish-language, Chicana/x, and Greater Mexico radio studies, calling attention to “brown listening,” feminist waves, and transborder listening communities. Josh Kun (2005), Alejandro Madrid (2011), Deborah Vargas (2012), and Alex E. Chávez (2017), among others, offer ways to qualify and tune in to the political, semiotic, and affective layers harmonized in transnational popular music soundscapes. Thinking about sound and power, Jennifer Stoever (2016) and Jonathan Rosa (2019) think about the consequences of racialized listening modes for both white and BIPOC communities . These, among an increasing collection of works across fields and disciplines, help us think about how the voice, either lyrically or narratively, stands in as “flesh” for Latine/x bodies and as sound evidence of past and continuedjoys and injustices (Casillas 2014).
Given the vast range of interdisciplinary exploration concerning soundscapes and listening practices within Latina/x Studies, we feel the time is ripe for a sintonía of scholarship attending to sound in Latinx cultures.
Some of the questions the volume may explore include:
- How do Latinx communities employ sound to address their social and political realities? How is sound both an abolitionist practice and a form of challenging settler-colonialism?
- How does sound facilitate intercultural dialogue between Latinx ethnic groups across regions, generations, and/or other markers of identity facing similar social and political struggles? How does sound work to craft sentiments of “home”?
- How does sound craft cultures that promote positive/utopian/future-leaning visions and/or revisionist Latinx histories? Will the revolution need a microphone or just a speaker?
- How are current Latinx Studies humanities and humanistic social science scholars engaging with sound as a category of analysis? How does their work converge with the larger fields of Sound Studies, Latinx Studies, and Latinx Media Studies? Or, how does sound help scholars of color “trespass” across disciplinary boundaries?
We invite humanities and humanistic social science approaches on topics including but not limited to:
- Sound as listening, listening as a sonic placemaking practice
- Listening methodologies, feminist listening, crip listening, brown listening, etc.
- Listening to images and texts, listening to literature
- Sound media, including analog, wireless (radio), and digital formats
- Soundscapes, borderscapes, sounds of gentrification
- Soundwalking as placemaking; tourist practices
- Music listening, private, public, and various hybrid domains
- Music scenes, fandoms, raves, serenades
- Digital sounds including voice filters, ASMR, Memes, Google Translate, Google Maps, Zoom
- Linguistic practices, slang, “accents,” translations
- Voice, voices, voicing, digital Black face, digital Brown face, feminist rage
- Noise as socially constructed, “high” volumes, sucio sounds (a la Deb Vargas)
- Surveillance, eavesdropping, chisme
- Sound as art, sound as defiance
Details for Participation:
Please submit a working title, five keywords, and an abstract (350 words) by April 15, 2024, to edmarti@uic.edu.
Selected contributors will meet at the Latinx Sound Studies Institute on June 10-11, 2024 (location TBA). We will cover the cost of travel, lodging (3 nights), and meals. Contributors will share a working draft (at least 50% completed) a week before the meeting.
Full manuscripts will be due September 30, 2024. 5000-6000 words, Chicago style, Notes and Bibliography format. There will be a round of additional revisions after editorial review.
Additional Information:
The Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative provides funding for this project through a
generous grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
For inquiries, please contact the editors: D. Inés Casillas [casillas@ucsb.edu], Esther Díaz Martín
[edmarti@uic.edu], or Sara V. Hinojos [sara.hinojos@qc.cuny.edu].