New Feminist Approaches to the Study of Race and Sound

Abstract

Gaye Theresa Johnson's Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012In 2003 trailblazers of feminist sound studies Frances Aparicio and Candida Jaquez astutely observed that, given overdetermined complexity of new global media regimes, critical attention to contemporary circulations of Latina/o popular musics throughout Americas would require no less than the transforming of traditional methodologies and theoretical frameworks that have defined music and music making primarily through discrete categories such as national identity and musical genre (2003, 9). Just over a decade later, a new generation of scholarship guided by this intellectual imperative has accomplished just that, deploying analytics of critical race, gender, and queer studies to remap contours, content, and conversations that have conventionally animated disciplines of popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. Gaye Theresa Johnsons Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles and Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda offer noteworthy contributions to this emergent interdisciplinary ferment. Significantly, both authors complicate subject/object relationship that has traditionally structured ethnomusicological inquiry, turning our eyes and tuning our ears to how cultural workers have mobilized repertories of song, sound, rhythm, and performance to critique, negotiate, and subvert constraints of everyday life. Through use of archives, feminist of analyses, and innovative methodologies, Johnson and Vargas persuasively demonstrate that geographies of sound must be understood as terrains of material and ideological struggle upon which aggrieved communities disrupt dominant historical narratives, negotiate structural forces and institutions, and fashion alternative social worlds.At a moment when so-called black/brown divide prevails as a commonsense axiom within U.S. public discourse, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity provides a timely intervention into antagonism-focused histories of relational racial formation. Johnsons richly researched historiography of Afro-Chicano cultural activism in post-World War II Los Angeles details parallel but not identical histories of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural demonization that have politicized black and brown communities in urban Southern California (ix). Critical of media narratives and institutional records that depict African Americans and Chicanos as continually at odds, Johnson instead chronicles a neglected history of infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color (xv). Combining methods and frames of ethnic and cultural studies, urban geography, and social movement history, Johnson deftly demonstrates how spatial proximity and cultural contact set stage for black and brown communities in urban Los Angeles to us[e] physical places they inhabited and discursive spaces they imagined to assert their common humanity and forge shared struggles grounded in mutuality and solidarity (x).Spaces of Conflict is theoretically anchored in convergence of two analytical repertoires: spatial and sonic. Johnson engages geographic most robustly in her ongoing discussion of dialectics of spatial mobility and spatial immobilization. She argues that dynamic structural forces that have shaped postwar Los Angeles-urban renewal, deindustrialization, erosion of welfare state, and resurgence of anti-immigrant revanchism-have consistently constrained physical, social, and economic mobility of city's poor communities of color. …