Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico

Vocality and Beyond

Sarah Finley

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780826506849, 9780826506856
• eBook ISBN: 9780826506863
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Mexican History

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 in casta paintings. 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 Mexico is 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translation, Nomenclature, and Transcriptions
• Introduction Percussions
• Chapter 1 Black Male Sopranos in New Spanish Cathedrals
• Chapter 2 Musical and Lyrical Rememberings of Black Male Sopranos
• Chapter 3 Harmonizing Blackness in Urban Political Ceremonies
• Chapter 4 Harmonizing Blackness in Popular Religious Settings
• Chapter 5 Harmonizing Blackness in Villancicos
• Chapter 6 Black Women’s Performance in Sor Juana’s Villancicos
• Conclusion Black Sounds Echo in New Spanish Waters
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index