The Cry of the Senses

Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics

Ren Ellis Neyra

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781478011170, 9781478010111
• eBook ISBN: 9781478012696
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

In The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations—across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral—while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: The Ground
• Acknowledgments
• Color Plates
• Introduction: Cry Bomba
• 1. “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa
• 2. “I have been forced to hear a lot”: The faln, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance
• 3. Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Cinema
• 4. Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge
• Coda, in Three: “fifty-two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index