Archive and the Aural City

Alejandro L. Madrid is Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University and the author of several books, including Tania LeÓn’s Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life and In Search of JuliÁn Carrillo and Sonido 13.

“The Archive and the Aural City showcases Alejandro L. Madrid’s erudition, theoretical curiosities, and rigorous research. Madrid not only makes key arguments that will shape new directions of Mexican and Latinx sound studies, he provides an overdue and pointed intervention into a tradition of Latin American critique that has prioritized the lettered and the visual as the primary drivers of nation-building. This book is a crucial addition to how sound, music, and archives are studied.” - Josh Kun, editor of The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles “A significant and thorough study of sound archives and the institutionalization of sound in post-revolutionary Mexico, The Archive and the Aural City is an outstanding work that accounts for both the role of aural archives in the understanding of modern culture and the significance of sound in the development of cultural memory. Alejandro L. Madrid interweaves paradigmatic conceptual work on the archive and on sound with key Latin American interventions, and his bold theoretical and historiographic expansions make this book important for those thinking about sound and archives globally.” - Ignacio Sánchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

• List of Illustrations  xiList of Abbreviations  xvAcknowledgments  xviiIntroduction. Questions about the Circulation of Knowledge at the Sonic Turn  11. Performing Listening, Writing, Reading, and the Assemblage of Archival Constellations  292. Patrimony, Objectification, and Representation at Mexico’s Fonoteca Nactional  573. Critical Constellations of the Audio-Machine in Mexico and the Performativity of Archiving/Archival Labor  854. Things, Sound Objects, and the Legacy at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv’s Konrad T. Preuss Collection  1175. Mexican Rarities, Disco pirata, and the Promise of a Sound Archive of Postnational Memory  1616. Aurality, Materiality, and the Carrillo Pianos as Archives  1917. In Search of the Aural City: Collective Action and the Invisible Sound Archive  227Epilogue. The Relevance of Archives in Times of Post-Truth: An Essay against Nihilism in the Neoliberal Age  270Notes  285Bibliography  315Index