What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his book Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Dylon Robbins approaches this question in a stunning series of chapters that move between Cuba and Brazil just as both nations were moving into post-emancipation and increasingly intense appeals to nationalist ideologies. New media such as the phonograph, as well as changing techniques in medicine and ethnography contributed to the complex entanglements of race, place and voice. Robbins uncovers new sites in which to explore these questions, such as the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory in Havana and revisits more familiar material, such as the work of Alejo Carpentier, with new frameworks.
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