Overview

In Geographies of the Ear, Tania Gentic examines the language and soundscape of post-Franco Barcelona to listen for the remnants of a globalized colonial ear. She theorizes “echoic memory” to understand how sound circulates from the past to the present—and from the neighborhood to the nation to the globe - to trace how sonic practices produce and contest modernity, community identity, and democracy. Focusing on migrant and tourist accents, free radio stations, punk music, drag performances, and anti-gentrification protests, Gentic shows how the underground sounds in Barcelona complicate a modernizing aural imaginary of place. By thinking through the auralities present in literature, fanzines, comic books, documentary films, television and print media, popular music, public protests, and even everyday conversation, Gentic outlines the difficulties of considering the contemporary city as either the product of a monolingual national identity or a lived space easily circumscribed by geographical categories such as North or South, East or West.

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9781478028802

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Geographies of the Ear deftly engages issues of race, ethnicity, and class to connect Barcelona's sonic landscape with the development of centralizing and peripheral nationalisms in Spain and colonial forms of oppression and dispossession. With an unprecedented emphasis on sound, Tania Gentic makes a fresh and innovative intervention that will become an important resource for all those interested in the global and transhistorical underpinnings of the complex historical and cultural development of modern Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain.""--José Luis Venegas, author of The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain ""In this extraordinary book, Tania Gentic produces a tour-de-force of archival work, critical ethnography, and cultural analysis. Tuning readers in to discordant histories that mix imperial expansion and regional independence, Geographies of the Ear offers a nuanced account of how artists and activists (punk squatters, queer actors, experimental novelists) have made sound central in struggles to determine what autonomy might mean.""--Tom McEnaney, author of Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas

“Geographies of the Ear deftly engages issues of race, ethnicity, and class to connect Barcelona’s sonic landscape with the development of centralizing and peripheral nationalisms in Spain and colonial forms of oppression and dispossession. With an unprecedented emphasis on sound, Tania Gentic makes a fresh and innovative intervention that will become an important resource for all those interested in the global and transhistorical underpinnings of the complex historical and cultural development of modern Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain.” - José Luis Venegas, author of The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain “In this extraordinary book, Tania Gentic produces a tour-de-force of archival work, critical ethnography, and cultural analysis. Tuning readers in to discordant histories that mix imperial expansion and regional independence, Geographies of the Ear offers a nuanced account of how artists and activists (punk squatters, queer actors, experimental novelists) have made sound central in struggles to determine what autonomy might mean.” - Tom McEnaney, author of Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas

Author Information

Tania Gentic is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and author of The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle.

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