Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond

Thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy have long championed sound as an affective register of Black subjectivity, particularly in the African Atlantic. Prior studies in this vein focus on the phonic contours of slavery and its afterlives in Anglophone or Caribbean contexts. The tendency furthers Mexico’s marginalization within narratives of the Black and African diaspora and mutes Afrosonic traditions that date back to the sixteenth century. Indeed, the New Spanish archive contains whispers of the region’s Black sound cultures, including monetary records for the voices of enslaved singers and representations of Afro-descendant music in the castas paintings. Despite such evidence, it is difficult to attend fully to these subaltern voices, for the cultural filters of the lettered elite often mute or misinterpret non-European sounds. Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond is the first extensive study of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain or elsewhere in colonial Latin America. In the New Spanish context, Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico attends to Afro-descendant sonorities through a filter of percussion. This framework remixes Jacques Derrida’s reading of the ear’s anatomy as antithetical to the philosophical voice with Afrosonic theories like Gilroy’s lower frequencies or Fred Moten’s phonic materiality. Its aim is to unsettle the divide between self and other so the auditory archive might emerge as a polyphonic record that exceeds dichotomies of sounding object/listening subject. Armed with percussive headphones and a historical DJ mindset, Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico samples Afro-descendant sounds in the archive in order to amplify Black subjectivities from New Spain. It seeks to recover and rearticulate Afro-descendant voices and auditory practices in New Spain. As scholars like Gary Tomlinson, Ana MarÍa Ochoa Gautier and Kathryn de Luna have shown, Western writing is a limited mode for capturing non-European sounds in the early Americas.