Book Blurbs
Fernández, Héctor and L'Hoeste and Pablo Vila, eds. 2013. Cumbia! Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cumbia has mattered, matters, and will most likely continue to matter for the multitudes who create it, listen and dance to it, and debate it almost as a way of life. This collection is both a sonic roadmap and testimony to the imagination of people across the Americas as they make some sense of their many worlds through music.
Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press.
“With generous voice and incisive ears, Aurality offers us the gift of listening to and through multiple histories, eavesdropping into a Colombian 19th-century archive in whose seemingly muted vociferations Ana María Ochoa Gautier hears nothing less than the clamor of the political-sensorial genealogy of the Latin American, Caribbean, and global present. Hearing, listening, speaking, writing, and voicing all emerge here as ontological wagers on life, on personhood, and on human - non-human relations. But this is no celebration of the sonorous, it is a most critically sober and theoretically eloquent call that we listen in order to think Latin American (and global) modernity and coloniality again for the first time.”
Flores, Juan. 2016. Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Think you know ‘Latin’ music? Think again. With keen ears, Flores challenges preexistent narratives of Latino music vernaculars in New York City during the long 1960s. Salsa Rising constitutes a fresh and indispensable cultural history of an unprecedented chapter in the annals of popular music.”
Vila, Pablo, ed. 2017. Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America. Lanham: Lexington Books.
“For the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the affective turn forcefully compels a return to bodies in their multifarious relations—with themselves, other bodies, places, communities, with things of all kinds, and much more. This remarkable volume makes another, and most audacious, turn: South. Incisive essays show the rich complexities of how affect and emotions animate musicking (making, listening, dancing) in the specificity of Latin America locations. In a stunning demonstration of post-constructionism, we experience affect and emotions as living correlates of meaning and as a dynamic force for the evasive but inescapable subsistence of identities and subjectivities.”
Fernández, Héctor and L'Hoeste and Pablo Vila, eds. 2018. Sound, Image, and National Imaginary in the Construction of Latin/o American Identities. Lanham: Lexington books.
“Once again the Americas reveal the persistence of gaps at the heart of the nexus between nation and society and of how their perdurance compels the endless but necessary work of the imagination. This broad-reaching collection illustrates how sound and images both seek to bridge across those gaps while making them audible and visible in the very affective responses they provoke. A must-read for anyone interested in Latin American politics of culture during the long twentieth century.”
Lapidus, benjamin. 2020. New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990. Jackson: University press of mississippi.
“A major achievement, this book exuberantly shares with its readers the richness of music making during an extraordinarily fecund period of New York City’s history. Latin music is heard as it traverses and brings together the spheres of the popular, the folkloric, the vernacular, the mass mediated, and the erudite. With deft hand and in remarkably high fidelity, Lapidus takes us in a journey to hear how music making entails multiply overlapping and sometimes conflicting terrain: migration, geo-political shifts, education and pedagogies at various levels, inter-ethnic encounters, enterprising business people and collectors, media, instrument makers, dancers, cities, all manner of experimentation, and above all the will and endless creativity of all the people involved on the ground.”
Gavin Williams, Format Friction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024)
With the conceptual elegance of a non-dogmatic philosopher, the fine attunement of an open-eared political theorist, and the finest of sensibilities of a historian towards societies, the passage of time, and the traces it everywhere leaves — all within the fold of a materially attentive musicology — Williams generously gives us a finely-grained and riveting story of how, why, where, and who comes into relation and entanglement when we harness sound to a material (shellac) and in a format (the disc). Like the friction required for the gramophone needle to render discs into sound, Format Fiction rubs against the political economies binding materials and audiences, materiality and listening, nature(s) and culture(s) so that the desires and imaginations of laborers, makers, sellers, consumers, thinkers, and tinkerers may yet be heard through a thicket of competing global forces. A stunning work.
Ofer Gazit, Jazz Migrations: Movement as Place Among New York Musicians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024)
Jazz Migrations listens deeply to an effervescent moment in the lives of the music in New York City, perceiving the profound impact that migration has in making and remaking and imagining and reimagining this impossibly rich and generous music. Gazit has ears for musicians, rendering “migration” plurally, as moving tales of musicians, their virtuosities, hopes, reflections, and histories irreducible to any single analytic category. But he also has ears for the music, and lots of it, for it is in and through sounds that music history inevitably unfolds. This is a groundbreaking work for understanding, at last, how jazz resonates loudly and widely across feedback loops that blur final distinctions between the old modern poles of center and periphery. An indispensable book.