La ciudad sonora: sonidos e itinerarios del espacio colonial en la ficción histórica latinoamericana
Open Access
- Author:
- Andrade Fernandez, Ricardo
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 25, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Krista Brune, Major Field Member
Sarah Townsend, Major Field Member
Matthew Restall, Outside Unit & Field Member
John Ochoa, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Paola Migliaccio-Dussias, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Latin American Literature
Latin American Film
Historical Fiction
Sound Studies
Spatial Studies
Contemporary Narrative - Abstract:
- La ciudad sonora examines the role of sound in the fictional construction of the Latin American colonial city in contemporary historical fiction. In doing so, I consider some novels and films set in the seventeenth century and published after 1989, to explore how they deconstruct historical space into audible fragments of the past and subversive displacements, thus proposing aural cartographies of the colonial city that destabilize official or hegemonic versions of the past. I analyze in this dissertation how historical fiction recreates the sensory experience of marginalized subjectivities of colonial space -mainly the indigenous, the African, the mestizo and women in general- to question the power relations that characterize the inharmonious urban fabric of the time. Chapter 1 explores the colonial soundscape of Mexico City in Enrique Serna's novel Ángeles del abismo (2004) as a conflictive space of religious and profane sonorities that define, shape and condition the anxieties of the inhabitants of the viceregal city, especially the indigenous and women. I analyze how amidst a set of dissonant superpositions constructed from picaresque writing and baroque pastiche, the novel evokes some sounds and listening practices to propose a critical rereading of the period. In this chapter I argue that the soundscape of the city underscores the political and social control to which the female body is subjected, the uses of religious and profane music in channeling the desires and fears of marginalized characters, and the sonic implications of the desecration of the city's sacred spaces. In Chapter 2, I investigate the sound of viceregal Lima in the film El bien esquivo (2001), by Augusto Tamayo San Román, as a means to interrogate the climate of intolerance that prevailed during the idolatry extirpation campaigns. Following the sonic recreation of the four elements of nature, I analyze how the sound of excavations reveals a conflict of forces involving different forms of violence in colonial Peru. I examine how the murmur of water leads to the sensory mismatch of the mestizo in the silent Catholic and indigenous sacred spaces. I also study how the air of the city appears impregnated with conflicting sonorities, such as the chimes, the noise of the market and the Catholic singing in the Indian neighborhoods. I also consider the deployment of detonations as sonorous pillars of colonial violence as well as the crackling of the sacrificial pyre as a metaphor of the destiny of subversive alterities in colonial space. Chapter 3 analyzes the way in which the sound space of seventeenth-century Salvador da Bahia is imagined by Ana Miranda in her novel Boca do Inferno (1989). I consider how the sounds of Bahian streets appear in the novel as intersections of the itineraries of commerce, religion, and political persecution. I examine how in Miranda's novel European and African music become means whereby the colonial subject projects its desires for possession onto the Other. I argue that colonial violence is sonically amplified through the appeal to the screams, moans and cries of the victims, while listening acts as a means of survival for the persecuted. I also analyze certain practices of hypo/hyperacusis in the novel as an auditory metaphor for the dynamics of power and corruption in the judicial context of colonial Bahia. In Chapter 4, I auscultate the sonic imagination around Cartagena de Indias in the novel La ceiba de la memoria (2007), by Roberto Burgos Cantor. I explore how, through the evocation of sound fragments, the author tries to recreate a noisy port, whose commercial sonority is built on the horrors of slavery. I examine the counterpoint between drums and bells through which the narrative presents the discrepant ways of hearing and decoding sound in the colonial city. I argue that the song of enslaved Africans resonates in the novel as a sonorous weapon, not only against the oppression of the system but also against oblivion. I also explore the literary inflections of the maroon's cry in relation to the slave's memory, language, rage and rebellion. My methodological approach draws on literary and filmic theories of historical fiction, theoretical frameworks from the field of sound studies, as well as theories of space. This enables me to explore in depth, and from an interdisciplinary perspective, the sonic dimension of these alternative versions of history that rewrite the colonial past in dialogue with the archive, but rooted in the sensory experience of the social, racial and gender alterities that inhabit and traverse the colonial city. By focusing on sound and listening as means of reinventing history, La ciudad sonora seeks to strengthen not only the scarce critical work that exists on historical fictions set in the Seventeenth Century, but also to contribute to recent studies on the relationship between literature and sound, as well as to the growing interest in colonial auralities within the sound studies field.