Editor’s Introduction to the Journal of Sonic Studies, issue 19

Special Issue 19: “Sounds of Latin America,” published 2020.

The solitude of Latin America is loud. It has always been. 

It is loud in the words of indigenous leaders taking again a (long overdue, much neglected) central role in making sense of the ongoing disaster of the world, which the native populations of Latin America have long foreseen and for which they have warned. It is loud in the ousting of democratically elected leaders and, concurrently, the emergence of imperialist, think-tank-backed self-appointed saviors. It is loud in the rise of Christian-conservative, twenty-first century schizoid militias with a particular penchant for eighteenth-century moral values. It is loud to such an extent that the threads linking the wounds inflicted by colonialism and the sustainment of patriarchal Latin America cannot be clearer, albeit seemingly silenced and obscured by the idea that there is an ongoing turmoil that our solitude has forever condemned us to dwell in.

[…]

Sound politics reveal that which coloniality tries to normalize: acts of silencing accomplished through history books, genocide, police violence, and a stream of (and collusion with) news sources and shady political negotiations. Those masses of blindfolded women, in Chile and around the world, remind themselves and everyone else that whenever coloniality tries to obstruct ways of seeing, that sounding, moving, and listening will stand as the most effective weapon for challenging, redirecting, and disrupting the insidious mechanisms of coloniality.

Read the full Editorial (as well as the full issue) here (WWW)