Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics by Ren Ellis Neyra Pamela Zamora Quesada (bio) Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics. Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. In terms of methodology, despite the title's focus on listening, Ren Ellis Neyra does not position "sound" as the most well-suited sense for critical analysis. Instead, they call for attuning to synesthesia "that erupt[s] from what was there before the US, and from places beyond and besides US regimes of representation" (xvi). These places are the territory of Puerto Rico and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Each chapter shows how, by attending to Black, Latinx, and queer sonic audiovisual archives—namely, films, performances, music, literary texts, and a court case transcript—it is possible to embody more ethical solidarities within Latinx and Caribbean realities. Following Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997), the introduction elaborates upon the paradigm of the cry as an inarticulate sound evoking unruliness (18). This sonic unruliness is demonstrated through the analysis of Nude Laughing, a performance by the Mexican American border artist Xandra Ibarra, and the concert of the Afro Puerto Rican group Macha Colón y los Okapi. Particularly illuminating in this regard is Ellis Neyra's reading of Ibarra's retching or laugh, which comes to represent the unruly sound of the Caribbean that rejects white gendered mandates and insists on possibilities of alternative modes of sense and being. Continuing with the analysis of performance, the first chapter addresses multisensorial listening as a variation of close reading. Ellis Neyra defines "unruly audition" as a mode of listening that derives from the excessive pleasure stimulated by salsa, in this case, a listening practice that disrupts market expectations placed on salsa dancers' bodies (31). For instance, Ellis Neyra investigates the riot that ended a Fania All-Stars concert at Yankee Stadium in 1973. Their reading of the riot suggests that an excessive pleasure engendered by salsa exceeded the expected behavior of the audience, troubling the commodification of the musicians and the listeners' status as consumers (35). Refusals of American sovereignty are at the core of the second chapter. Chapter 2 begins by analyzing Lady, a character in Nuyorican playwright Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses (2003), who is held captive in a toilet room by another [End Page 109] character, Gentleman. Lady, a farcical metonymy of Puerto Rico's political status (66), does not contest her subjugated position by verbally confronting her captor, but rather through excretory sounds. Ellis Neyra then reads Lady's refusal alongside a real-life refusal: that of Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, "Puerto-and Chicago-Rican" member of the political group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) (56), who declined to engage in court proceedings related to her part in the bombing of US infrastructure. Insisting on her incarcerated condition (referring, by extension, to the Puerto Rican colonial situation), she declares the trial is "illegal from her (collective) anticolonial position" (85). Lady and Beltrán Torres exercise agency that "does not restore narratives of 'self-possession' and individuation" (89). Thus, the chapter claims that their sonic performances resist "the patriarchalization of female gender as white, properly domesticated, and in existence for the increase of white individuated holdings on being" (88). The third chapter theorizes the concept of "sensorial errancy" in relation to the films of Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. For Ellis Neyra, each film recreates an escape of the touristic and military gaze of municipalities Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques. This escape occurs by way of the chapter's anchoring concept of sensorial errancy, which refers to the displaced centrality of "white humanist narrative and its antiblack hierarchy of the senses," which make space for an alternative Puerto Rican history, still unknown and therefore only imagined (109). Sensorial errancy sonically orients viewers to images and sounds within an opaque relationship that requires an attentive and slow apprehension. For instance, in Otros usos (2014) Santiago Muñoz...