Radio And The Gendered Soundscape

This book is a history of women's voices on the radio in two of South America's most important early radio markets. It explores what it meant to hear female voices on the radio and asks readers to consider gender in its aural and sonic dimensions.

Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gender roles, race, community, religion, and populism. They also demonstrate how sound is essential to the formation of citizenship and nationalism. Sonic media, and radio in particular, have become primary tools for contesting political issues. In that vein, the contributors view the control of radio transmission and those who manipulate its content for political gain. Conversely, they show how, in neoliberal climates, radio programs have exposed corruption and provided a voice for activism. The chapters address sonic production in a variety of media: radio, Internet, digital recordings, phonographs, speeches, carnival performances, fireworks festivals, and the reinterpretation of sound in literature. They examine the embodied experience of listening and its importance to memory coding and identity formation. This collection looks to sonic media as an essential vehicle for transmitting ideologies, imagined communities, and culture. As the contributors discern, sound is ubiquitous, and its study is therefore crucial to understanding the flow of information and influence in Latin America and globally.

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.

An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music. Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker’s performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins’s new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

Immediately after the Second World War, the radio was the best-preserved medium of mass communication in Germany. This book explores the implications of this dominance by asking how everyday broadcasting constructed ideas of 'normal' times, people and places in the destroyed, divided and occupied zones of what would become the Federal Republic.

Explores how radio broadcasting and the emerging audio culture transformed the dynamics of French politics during the tumultuous interwar decades.

′This innovative and clearly written handbook does exactly what it claims on the cover, providing students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in Radio Studies... Chignell writes about radio with an engaging mixture of scholarly detachment and private passion′ - The Radio Journal ′There is a need for a straightforward, wide-ranging, and up-to-date introduction to ways to study radio and other new audio-based media. Hugh Chignell′s new book certainly fits the bill, and admirably takes the reader from initial ideas through to additional readings which explore the core issues in greater depth. It is crisply and engagingly written, draws upon a very good range of scholarship, and provides many useful contemporary examples... Students will find it an essential aid to their studies, and it may even go someway to ensuring that the study of radio is as important in the academy as its visual cousins′ - Viewfinder ′This book is a useful starting point for radio students and staff, packed with citations and pithy comment from the author. It is a rich resource book for academic radio study at all levels′ - Janey Gordon, University of Bedfordshire The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensible study aids and guides to comprehension. Key Concepts in Radio Studies: " Provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use introduction to the field " Grounds theory with global examples " Takes it further with recommended reading " Covers the central ideas and practices from production and media studies " Situates radio studies within its historical context and contemporary auditory culture

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such »staged sounds« express the changing identities of cities? This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike. With contributions by Jasper Aalbers, Karin Bijsterveld, Carolyn Birdsall, Ross Brown, Andrew Crisell, Andreas Fickers, Annelies Jacobs, Evi Karathanasopoulou, Patricia Pisters, Holger Schulze, Mark M. Smith and Jonathan Sterne.