Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond [Hardcover]

Thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy have long championed sound as an affective register of Black subjectivity, particularly in the African Atlantic. Prior studies in this vein focus on Anglophone or Caribbean contexts, a tendency that furthers Mexico’s marginalization within narratives of the Black and African diaspora and mutes Afro-descendant traditions that date back to the sixteenth century. Indeed, the New Spanish archive contains whispers of the region’s Black sound cultures, including monetary records for the voices of enslaved singers and representations of Black music incastapaintings. Despite such evidence, it is difficult to attend fully to these subaltern voices, for the cultural filters of the lettered elite often mute or misinterpret non-European sounds.

Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexicois the first extensive study of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain or elsewhere in colonial Latin America. In this context, it attends to Black sounds through a framework that remixes Jacques Derrida’s reading of the ear’s anatomy with theories like Gilroy’s lower frequencies or Fred Moten’s phonic materiality. Sarah Finley’s aim is to unsettle the divide between self and other so the auditory archive might emerge as a polyphonic record that exceeds dichotomies of sounding object / listening subject. Through sampling the Afro-descendant sounds of this archive, this book recovers and rearticulates Black voices and auditory practices in New Spain.The first extensive study of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain or elsewhere in colonial Latin America“Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexicois a fascinating and imaginative read with a strong social justice spirit. Finley offers a way to consider alternatives to histories of New Spain that have often excluded Black voices.”
—Drew Edward Davies, editor ofManuel de Sumaya: Villƒ8