Overview

In The Florida Room Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to offer a lush story of place and people, movement and memory, dispossession and survival. She transforms the ""Florida room""-an actual architectural phenomenon-into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami's musical cultures and everyday life. Drawing on songs, ephemera, and oral histories from artists, families, and inheritors of their traditions, Vazquez hears Miami as a city that has long been shaped by Indigenous Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and southern Georgia. She draws connections between seemingly disparate artists, sounds, and stories, from singer Gwen McCrae to pirate radio innovator DJ Uncle Al, from the Miccosukee rock band Tiger Tiger to the Cuban-American songwriter Desmond Child, among the percussionists Dafnis Prieto, Obed Calvaire, and Yosvany Terry, and through the notes of Eloise Lewis, Betty Wright, and the Miami Bass group Anquette. By listening to musical collaborations and ancestral ties across place and time, Vazquez brings together formal musical details, the histories of people and locations they hold, and the aesthetic traditions transformed inside them.

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9781478017929

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Reviews

Alexandra T. Vazquez's bold, brilliant, and refreshingly unconventional meditation on sonic placemaking in Florida is fearless and groundbreaking. Compressing the deep, wide, and volatile politics and poetics of the global South into a focused exploration of the Sunshine State, The Florida Room reminds readers of what daring, innovative, and challenging theory looks and sounds like. This luminous book opens up our notions of what counts as theory as well as who gets identified as theorists. -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound * Not only does The Florida Room come to us at just the right time in the history of Miami cultures, it arrives from a scholar who is a great interpreter of the interplay between music, performance, and the social. Alexandra T. Vazquez amasses an archive of fascinating materials, listens to them in every sense for what they say about themselves and that which circulates around them, and accounts for that creativity and thought in prose that is virtuosic and open to surprises. This singular book is a true gift. -- Antonio Lopez, author of * Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America *

Alexandra T. Vazquez's bold, brilliant, and refreshingly unconventional meditation on sonic placemaking in Florida is fearless and groundbreaking. Compressing the deep, wide, and volatile politics and poetics of the global South into a focused exploration of the Sunshine State, The Florida Room reminds readers of what daring, innovative, and challenging theory looks and sounds like. This luminous book opens up our notions of what counts as theory as well as who gets identified as theorists. -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound * Not only does The Florida Room come to us at just the right time in the history of Miami cultures, it arrives from a scholar who is a great interpreter of the interplay between music, performance, and the social. Alexandra T. Vazquez amasses an archive of fascinating materials, listens to them in every sense for what they say about themselves and that which circulates around them, and accounts for that creativity and thought in prose that is virtuosic and open to surprises. This singular book is a true gift. -- Antonio Lopez, author of * Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America * As Vazquez identifies unexpected resonances and collaborations-snaking her way through singer Betty Wright, the Indigenous rock group Tiger Tiger, and Miami bass's Luke Skyywalker Records-her prose is lively and darting, as if refusing to let a central narrative congeal. It's a loving and rich account of somewhere that exists both in real life and the imagination, too abundant to be contained. -- Cat Zhang * PItchfork, Best Music Books of 2022 *

Author Information

Alexandra T. Vazquez is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and author of Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, also published by Duke University Press.

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