Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean Edited by Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood (review)

Put it in writing! This useful advice powerfully conveys the perceived superiority of the written word over its spoken counterpart. Put it in writing! also points to the ephemeral character of the spoken word—of sound—while pointing to the everlasting nature of the written record. Sound passes by and soon becomes irretrievable; text, on the other hand, remains and can be used in perpetuity. While colonial historians doing history of the Caribbean and other tropical lowlands are acutely aware of the durability—or lack thereof—of written records (humidity has rendered many valuable documents unreadable and thus lost to historical scrutiny), the fact remains that words on paper constitute the bulk of historians’ primary sources.

Because Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean seeks to “decenter music” (without “excluding it altogether”), its essays encompass a large spectrum of sounds that constitute “a multi-vocal sonic environment” (xii). Fernando de Sousa Rocha guides us through the sounds of “producing and listening popular music” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil (4). Christine Ehrick uses the concepts of “radio transvestism” and “sonic drag” to challenge the idea of the disembodiment of radio voices. In her analysis, radio voices are not disembodied but directly associated with what she calls a “heard body,” a body imagined on the basis of “voice and vocal performance” (20). Gisela Cramer, connecting sound studies to diplomatic history, studies the role of U.S. radio broadcasters in the creation of a (stratified) pan-American community during the times of the Good Neighbor Policy. Alejandra Bronfman reminds us that radio waves, and the messages they transmit, require a logistics of transmission. Radio technicians, therefore, appear in her essay as subversives whose technical skills—the “weapons of the geek”—made them powerful enough to silence the government and give voice to workers, strikers, and other anti-government activists in 1930s Cuba. Alejandro Madrid chronicles the “góber precioso affair”—a political scandal linking the governor of the state of Puebla, Mexico, with international networks of child pornography and prostitution—to weight in on the debate on how excessive media coverage and listening practices trivialize political corruption and turn democracy into a spectacle. Sound, in the forms of the recording of the governor’s conversation, its broadcasting on national radio and its later diffusion, in Mexico and the U.S., as a popular song and as a series of ringtones for cellular phones, takes center stage in Madrid’s analysis of the erosion of democracy in Mexico (72). Gonzalo Araoz and Andrew Grant Wood turn away from radio to a sonic environment of festivals that includes “the excessive input of sound” Araoz associates with the Alba rite of Oruro’s Carnival and the equally excessive noise of fireworks in Veracruz’s carnival and Candelaria festival. Music, Sound, and Culture, thus, is about music, radio, literature that places sound at the center of the story, background noise, and even silence or the possibility of silence. It is, in its editors’ words, “by no means a comprehensive collection of “sound histories” but a pioneering aural source sampling” designed “to encourage further explorations and experimentations” in the study of the sonic environments of Latin America and the Caribbean (xvi).

The multiplicity of themes and sonic experiences explored in the essays is far from producing a cacophony. A common reliance on Jacques Attali and Benedict Anderson provides the authors a firm theoretical ground to launch their sonic explorations. While acknowledging the multiple problems associated with writing about sounds (especially about those sounds that they themselves cannot hear), the contributors to Media, Sound, and Culture embrace the challenge of “privileging sound as a critical sense in which to decipher issues of social and cultural change” (xi). Using Jacques Attali’s contention that “we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its arts, and by its festivals, than...