On Site, in Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina by Kirstie A. Dorr (review)

Kirstie Dorr’s elegantly written book examines the transnational circulation of South American sonic practices. On Site, in Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina analyzes the particularities of geographic emplacement and the dynamism of cultural movement vis-à-vis struggles over political governance, economic vision, and cultural representation in the Americas. The book thus conceptualizes Latin America “not as a fixed or stable regional location, but rather as a spatialized claim to relative and relational modes of creative production” (3). Discussing actors, aesthetics, texts, and practices that operate at the edge of circulation, Dorr argues that sonic production and spatial formation are co-constituting processes in Latin America.

Wedding theory from geographical, sound, and performance studies, Dorr deploys the term “performance geography” to analyze relationships among sound, space, and difference. First, the concept intends to highlight “the realms, distances, and surfaces within, across, and through which sound travels; the mechanisms of its production, amplification, and mediation; and sound’s contextual relationship with other modes of cultural production and signification” (18–19). Second, performance geography seeks to foreground the ways that space and place animate media circulation, “thereby interrogating the dominant racial capitalist landscapes within global Southern sounds are most often (de)localized and (de)valued” (19). Finally, the term emphasizes the spatial dimension of sonic labor, exploring how “artists and activists use performance as a means of confronting the constraints of their physical and discursive containment and/or abandonment, and conversely, how they creatively manipulate social space to enable new modes, relations, and venues of performance” (19). All in all, this theoretical construct seeks to underscore the ways that geographic sites and media circuits (re)configure and are (re)configured by sound practice.

A heterogeneous constellation of sonic phenomena makes up the book’s pithy four chapters. The first section conceptualizes the famous indigenista tune “El condor pasa” as a “geographic story—that is, a text that, through ongoing processes of aural transmission and transit, comes to sound both an emplaced and abstracted accumulation of political sensibilities, aesthetic encounters, and ideological claims” (26). According to Dorr, the sociospatial effects of the piece’s numerous iterations—which range from Simon and Garfunkel’s appropriation to Yma Sumac’s psychedelic rendition—demonstrate that music has the potential to transform the constructions of place with which it comes into contact. The author examines the transnational circulation of Andean sounds vis-à-vis the world music industry in the second chapter. She contends that the sonic productions of the Andean music industry—an informal business constituted by artists ranging from itinerant musicians in California to YouTube star Wendy Sulca—unsettle master narratives about the circulation of world music. Dorr argues that these musical transits confront, exploit, and resist the constraints imposed by mainstream structures of sonic production and circulation. The third chapter focuses on female Afro-Peruvian artists, asserting that their “collective work as political activists and cultural producers can be understood as both formed by and formative of performance geographies of Black feminist diasporicity” (98). The book contends that artists such as Katherine Dunham, Victoria Santa Cruz, Susana Baca, and Peta Robles challenge US-centric conceptualizations of the African diaspora. In the fourth chapter, Dorr reviews the political and artistic work of the San Francisco community space La Peña del Sur—a venue modeled after the famous gatherings of Chilean Nueva Canción artists and aficionados. She highlights three sociospatial aspects of the place: its queer organizational structure, its simultaneous local and transnational character, and its relationship with sustainability and institutionalization. The chapter argues that the Californian space transcends the limitations of the Chilean venues by functioning as a contact zone for different socio-sonic groups. The book’s epilogue briefly discusses the Peruvian pirate market El Hueco, asserting that informal businesses in Latin America “function as important sites of collective knowledge, digital curation, and artistic registry” (186).

Although the publisher framed...