In Geographies of the Ear, Tania Gentic examines the language and soundscape of post-Franco Barcelona to listen for the remnants of a globalized colonial ear. She theorizes “echoic memory” to understand how sound circulates from the past to the present—and from the neighborhood to the nation to the globe - to trace how sonic practices produce and contest modernity, community identity, and democracy. Focusing on migrant and tourist accents, free radio stations, punk music, drag performances, and anti-gentrification protests, Gentic shows how the underground sounds in Barcelona complicate a modernizing aural imaginary of place. By thinking through the auralities present in literature, fanzines, comic books, documentary films, television and print media, popular music, public protests, and even everyday conversation, Gentic outlines the difficulties of considering the contemporary city as either the product of a monolingual national identity or a lived space easily circumscribed by geographical categories such as North or South, East or West.
By:
Tania Gentic
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 572g
ISBN: 9781478028802
ISBN 10: 1478028807
Series: Sign, Storage, Transmission
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 19 September 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface ix Introduction. Echoic Memories of Dispossession 1 1. Travel, Race, and the Colonial Sleight of Ear 30 2. Of Immigrants and Accents 75 3. Radiophonic Restlessness 123 4. Protest and the Acoustic Limits of Democracy 170 Coda. The Humble Ear and the Shape of Sound 225 Acknowledgments 235 Notes 237 Bibliography 269 Index 289
Tania Gentic is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and author of The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle.
Reviews for Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona
“Geographies of the Ear deftly engages issues of race, ethnicity, and class to connect Barcelona’s sonic landscape with the development of centralizing and peripheral nationalisms in Spain and colonial forms of oppression and dispossession. With an unprecedented emphasis on sound, Tania Gentic makes a fresh and innovative intervention that will become an important resource for all those interested in the global and transhistorical underpinnings of the complex historical and cultural development of modern Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain.” - José Luis Venegas, author of The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain “In this extraordinary book, Tania Gentic produces a tour-de-force of archival work, critical ethnography, and cultural analysis. Tuning readers in to discordant histories that mix imperial expansion and regional independence, Geographies of the Ear offers a nuanced account of how artists and activists (punk squatters, queer actors, experimental novelists) have made sound central in struggles to determine what autonomy might mean.” - Tom McEnaney, author of Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas
