The United Fruit Company’s Sonic Investments

Event Description

These lectures explore an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first three lectures I approach the centrality of media and the development of new sound technologies in such a history. I particularly focus on the transformation of the relation between histories of life, extractivism, and sound produced by sound technologies. In the last two lectures I approach an intertwined counterarchive: that of the rise of indigenous film and works by indigenous intellectuals in Colombia and Brazil during the early twenty-first century and the conceptualizations of music, voice, and sound in specific works produced by them. All lectures are based on different archival and ethnographic materials from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

This is the second lecture of a five-part series of lectures.