In Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in 19thCentury Colombia, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how language, music, voice, and sound produce critical discourses about personhood and cultural citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean. This session draws from Ochoa’s groundbreaking study of nineteenth century Colombian aural history to understand how the past appears in ghostly form in contemporary transborder Mexican cultural production. Each of these three presentations explores how a distinct aural archive weaves together previous iterations of sounds, first drawing the listener in to an auditory universe of familiarity and belonging, and then exploding --through humor, irony, and aural distortion-- the comforting or nostalgic notions of shared lived experience that this archive might have evoked. We look to three specific moments and spaces in Mexican culture: the soundtrack and soundscape of Alfonso Cuarón's 2018 Oscar-winning film Roma; filmic representations of the surveillance and repressive technologies of the War on Drugs at the U.S.-Mexico border; and the creation of a transgressive aural space for social critique through humor in the performance of Jarocho and other oral-popular musical forms.
We consider how filmmakers, musicians, and writers voice critical discourses through aurality and oral-popular signs to reveal the deep inter-aural and intertextual entanglements within these different types of cultural production. Analisa Taylor shows how Alfonso Cuarón’s use of sinister auditory and visual realia (political propaganda, film, television, music, distorted voice and ambient sound) in Roma (2019) underscores the absence of reciprocity and empathy across urban/rural race, class, and gender divides, specifically as it pertains to obstetric violence, military repression, and domestic servitude. Miguel López Lozano considers the role that sound plays in current films such as “Sicario” (Dennis Villeneuve, 2015) in creating a sense of the ominous and bringing to light the presence of the abject other in neoliberal discourses in which Mexico and the United States are cast as partners in the promotion of modern North American hemispheric citizenship; Blanca Aranda Gómez García demonstrates how the musical form of Son Jarocho strategically deploys humor to bring the listener into contact with a very human expression -laughter- while generating an alternative imaginary whereby Mexico’s oral-popular critical discourses are re-imbued with the intellectual, aesthetic, and affective complexity of indigenous, afrodescendent, and mestizo cultural histories.
In keeping with the 2020 presidential theme “Being Human,” this session reflects on the human construction of cultural consciousness through the alternative textualities of oral-popular discourse and aural-musical archives in the transborder Americas. While film viewers and listeners of traditional regional Mexican musical genres such as Jarocho may miss the uncanny soundscapes, soundtracks, and critical political discourses contained within them, our analyses of these cultural productions as alternative textualities reveal a more heterogeneous political unconscious of the societies from which they emerge than might otherwise be visible and audible within the dominant U.S.-Anglo cultural imaginary about Mexico, Latin America, and the Latinx United States. Registering these aural archives as alternative textualities invites us to think of transborder Mexico as a problematic space of cultural citizenship, and also to reframe our understanding of how human oppression, exploitation, and resistance are aurally as well as visually archived and technologically re-scrambled/aestheticized in the present. Ultimately, we aim to reveal the ways in which human experience is often shaped by forms of cultural production beyond written texts.In the cacophony of globalization, the voice of the other —often recorded only as the silence of the other—reminds us of the task of mourning that is always part of that human experience.
Together, these three studies of aurality in film and music draw from narratology, poetry, film and music history, composition theory, and cultural studies. Each considers what kinds of access to the political unconscious orality, aurality, and musicality might offer that other forms of cultural production alone might not. Looking at the dynamics between the written text and these alternative texts and textual practices highlights a constant struggle over the connection between textual structure and meaning within dominant graphocentric discourses. This critical exercise brings us to reach into the meaning contained in other types of unwritten registers, in particular, that of allegory. According to Walter Benjamin (El origen del drama barroco Alemán, 1925), allegory reconciles our ways of acquiring knowledge with our perceptions, allowing us to narrate our experiences and thus communicate our humanness. Yet as Silvia Rivera (Sociología de la imagen, 2015) observes, allegory is not reducible to individual experience, but is instead collective. As we look at oral-popular musical discourse and filmic-aural associations within these specific times and places in this session, we discover new webs of individual narratives that serve as grounds for political action and contain powerful seeds of knowledge that, as Benjamin might have it, “light up that past spark” as well as “fuel [our] present crisis.”
Each of the three participants will have 20 minutes to deliver their presentation, followed by 15 minutes for discussion, for a total of 75 minutes.