Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona

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.