Transnational Soundscapes: Literary and Sonic Cultures Across the Americas and Iberia

The Transnational Soundscapes Symposium was born out of a concentration of people working on aural cultures in the Duke University Department of Romance Studies and beyond. The symposium took place on February 25, 2020 in the historic East Duke Building, Pink Parlor. Duke University has already hosted major events and guest speakers following this line of inquiry, such as Remapping Sound Studies: A Turn to the Global South (2016), Listening to LatinX (2019), Sound, Citizenship, and Aural Ecologies of Place (2019), and more recently, The Colonial Ear (2020). In joining this rich tradition, the symposium added an emphasis on the development of the field of Sound Studies across the Americas and Iberia; a transnational proposal that included Spanish and Portuguese-speaking contexts. The event was designed with the intent of fomenting conversation among experts in the field of Sound Studies, and symposium participants coming from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, each talk was followed by two different formal responses in addition to time for Q&A.

The symposium opened with an introduction from the co-organizers; Dr. Silvia Serrano, Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Latino/a Studies, along with Marcelo Noah and Elia Romera Figueroa, PhD candidates in the Romance Studies department. They emphasized how attention to sound can lead us to types of inquiry that are inherently interdisciplinary in nature; ones that quite literally resonate across national bounds or established academic fields. The co-organizers were also quick to recognize that such an event would not have been possible without the significant support of several institutional entities including: the Dean of Humanities, the Graduate School, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, the Department of Romance Studies, the Social Movements Lab, the Department of Music, the Health Humanities Lab, the Forum for Scholars and Publics, the Masters in Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Theatre Studies; in addition to sponsorship from the Department of Cultural Anthropology; the Center for International and Global Studies; the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities; the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies; the Vice Provost of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Program in Literature and the Trinity Language Council. The organizers took a minute to thank Dr. Louise Meintjes, in particular, for offering them support and guidance throughout the organization process. Professors Meintjes’s Sounds Studies seminar was an important introduction to the field for all of them. It also became a space for creating the interdisciplinary network of scholars between Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that served as the impetus for this event.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Alejandro L. Madrid, presented a history of the advent of sound studies as a celebrated move away from logocentrism in his talk, “The Politics of Distinction and Representation in the Aural Turn: Who Gets to Listen in the ‘Sounded’ City.’” Through a survey of sonic cultures in Mexico and what he called the “phonic fantasy of the nation state,” Madrid explored the question of how affective ties to an ever-changing idea of the motherland are developed through sound. He addressed how, on one hand, the aural turn allows for unprecedented accessibility through an emphasis on orality, aurality in tandem with current forms of democratization of technology. While, on the other hand, Madrid pointed out the shortcomings and contradictions of a “sounded city” as a supposedly more egalitarian imagined community than the nineteenth century conception of a “lettered city.” In response, Dr. David García honed in on the work of two sound artists mentioned in Madrid’s talk in order to emphasize the importance of recognizing aurality’s hierarchical structures. In this case of anthropological sound studies, García insisted, this often takes the form of an epistemological gap separating the ethnographer from subjects in their local context. García wondered if such a gap was more an act of resistance of the locals than a lack of awareness or knowledge of their own listening practices. To conclude, García brought up a recording of children held captive at the U.S.-Mexico border to illustrate how the sounds of violence in the state of Guerrero had been bypassed in the creation of a national soundscape. Dr. Silvia Serrano followed up by citing Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s evolving corpus, in addition to the works of Alex Chávez in Sounds of Crossing and of Jonathan Rosa in Looking like a Language, Sounding like Race, to underscore the role of sound and listening in the creation of ethnoracial categories of othering in Latinx America. Also, noting Madrid’s emphasis on the unfulfilled potential of the sonic turn to reformulate conceptions of the public and the private sphere, Serrano asked whether radio—which dwells between the private and the public—could offer an answer to this inquiry? Both respondents stressed the vital questions of who is listening and how are they listening when it comes to understanding the “sonic windows” into particular subjectivities and epistemologies that Madrid highlighted.

During the second module of the day, Dr. Silvia Bermúdez presented a lecture entitled “Migration and the Politics of Belonging in 21st Century Barcelona: Musical Stories as Counter Memory.” Bermúdez talked the audience through the case study of two musical groups that emerged from Barcelona at the turn-of-the-millennium; Che Sudaka and the Orquesta Árabe de Barcelona (OAB). Through a close reading of a song from each group, Bermúdez demonstrated the importance of music as social practice in the city’s evolving El Raval neighborhood. She argued that sound, migration, and urban regeneration processes all intersected to historicize an important cultural moment wherein Barcelona claimed its place on the global stage following Spain’s transition to democracy. This newfound cosmopolitanism depended on an influx of immigrants from the Maghreb, Latin America and beyond. Thus, for Bermúdez, these songs serve as an important site of counter memory that runs against xenophobic and nativist discourses. They instead promote a new politics of belonging and opportunity to build intercultural ties. Elia Romera Figueroa responded with a question about the lack of female representation amongst the musical groups cited, asking whether this corpus accurately portrayed the feminization of immigration to Spain in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Did musical production from the period account for women’s voices amongst this chorus of migrant newcomers? Anna Tybinko followed up by inquiring about the confluence of musical traditions groups like Che Sudaka and OAB are drawing from. Citing the more recent example of Rosalía, whose Flamenco-inspired style often includes elements of reggaetón along with other Latin American and Caribbean rhythms, Tybinko asked what the further blending of sounds tells us about Spanish cities as loci of enunciation or space of creation for an ever-evolving transnational music scene. And lastly, will music continue to be the site of counter memory or are there risks of appropriation along with popularization?

In the third talk, “Testimonial Listening: Indexical Meanings of Material Sound,” Dr. Tom McEnaney shared some of the initial findings for “‘Rigoberta’s Listener’: The Significance of Sound in Testimonio,” published in the Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) in March 2020. In reviewing the now-famous interview with Rigoberta Menchú as recorded onto cassette tapes by anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos Debray, McEnaney called attention to aspects of Menchú’s testimony that are absent in the written version. He thereby shed new light on the decades-old genre of testimonio via attention to the recorded sound as material object in its own right. Working with the theory of entextualization as employed by scholars such as Michael Allan, Virginia Jackson and Michael Lucey, among others, McEnaney explored how certain ideologies regarding the appropriate medium for literature have elided the importance of aurality. In the case of Menchú’s iconic testimonio, this talk elucidated how the process of transcribing, editing and publishing her statements as the text, I, Rigoberta Menchú, effectively muted the speaker’s voice. Speaking from the perspective of Musicology, respondent Guillermo Lupi underscored the contingency of sound production on recording practices, even before that object becomes a text. Marcelo Noah responded by reflecting on the endless possibilities embedded in the entextualization of sound artifacts. To this end, Noah pointed to the importance of recognizing the multiple valences of manipulated discourse in the post-truth context that we are facing today.

The symposium concluded with Dr. Alejandra Bronfman’s “Face à l'Opinion: Echoes of Impunity in Argentina and Haiti.” Drawing directly from recently digitized materials from the Radio Haiti-Inter Collection at Duke University, Bronfman’s talk aimed to decenter US and Euro-centric scholarship on radio, dictatorship and the Cold War bringing to light specific parallels between post-dictatorship discourses in Argentina and in Haiti, not evident in nationally driven literatures on the topic. In the 1990’s Haitian journalist and broadcaster Jean Dominique hosted Argentine human rights lawyer Rodolfo Matarrollo and Nora Cortiñes of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who drew comparisons between their countries and found resonances in human rights violations and ongoing battles against impunity. Returning to these interviews, and how they were recorded in the archive speaks to a South-South effort to challenge authoritarianism that has received very little critical attention until now. Dr. Laura Wagner, anthropologist, Project Archivist for the Radio Haiti Archives and curator for the recent Radio Haïti Inter exhibit, responded by discussing the archivist’s role as custodian who is faced with the weighty task of undoing the violence done on the archive. Wagner discussed the excitement of seeing the diverse ways that scholars could utilize the collection and considered how Bronfman’s attention to the Spanish recordings revealed the importance of indexing digital collections according to language. Ayanna Legros built on Wagner’s point about digital collections by addressing the parallels between Bronfman’s paper and Lara Putnam’s article, “Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” Legros suggested that the digitization of archives and collections will impact what researchers do, see and hear with their materials. She centered on the implications of having an Argentine adopt a Haitian activist and journalist’s point of view when thinking through human rights violations. Lastly, Legros took this as yet another indication that the regional boundaries and borders that we place on Latin America need to be unpacked and complicated.

These four discussion-oriented presentations would have been followed by the participation of the Chilean artist and activist collective LASTESIS. Their sonic performance, Un violador en tu camino, has been enacted by women from Washington to Istanbul. This protest piece brings to life the symposium’s central query: What is a “transnational soundscape”? How does it sound and look like? Event organizers Silvia Serrano and Elia Romera-Figueroa performed this feminist hymn in January 2020 in Raleigh, NC both in Spanish and English. There they met with local activists and members of the Triangle community who were excited to be able to attend this closing act of the Symposium. Unfortunately, LASTESIS had to cancel their participation last minute. While it was a sad turn of events, their absence still raised interesting questions about how the chant’s lyrics-as written text-align with the choreography, sounds and words used during the performance. Symposium participants also discussed the trajectory of the chant’s evolution as it adapted, translated and performed live world-wide.

Taken together, the four presentations—not to mention the responses and general dialogue that followed each one—laid fruitful ground for future conversations about sonic cultures. As the day’s events made clear, an attention to sound allows for us to voice a perspective on lived experience, past and present, that is often relegated to the margins of visual or textual narratives. A final reflection amongst participants was that “remembering is naming and creating a vocabulary for it”—and that said vocabulary is inherently vocal, that is both “oral” and “aural” once recorded.

Written by Anna Tybinko, Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Studies and Event Respondent