"Geographies of the Ear examines the multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory sonic landscapes of Barcelona and what happens when these historically and ideologically coded sounds come into contact within the fraught urban space of the city. Tania Gentic terms these disjunctive acts of listening "echoic memory," a process where accents and sounds are resignified in ways that both highlight and obfuscate their historical entanglement with colonialism. While Barcelona was a bastion of resistance against Francoist fascism-and the notion of a linguistically homogenous centralized Spanish state-the city was also an important economic node in the global colonial era, a node which has now become globalized through large flows of immigrants into the city. Immigration from Africa, Latin America, and poorer parts of Spain with their own dialects has rendered Barcelona a polyglot city, producing a linguistic diversity that can come into tension with Catalan linguistic separatism. Examining the politics of accents during the Spanish transition to democracy; how public trans performance disrupted the production of orderly urban space during the transition; how avant-garde radio challenged the nationalist project; and contemporary Barcelona anti-gentrification movement's aural riots, Gentic maps the ways that sounds and accents index complex, transhistorical debates about colonialism, immigration, and democracy"--
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 presentand from the neighborhood to the nation to the globeto 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, South, East, or West.
Tania Gentic examines the soundscape of post-Franco Barcelona to point out 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.
