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 neighborhood to nation to 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 antigentrification 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 is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and author of The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle.

Preface  ix
Introduction. Echoic Memories of Dispossession  1
1. Travel, Race, and the Colonial Sleight of Ear  30
2. Of Immigrants and Accents  75
3. Radiophonic Restlessness  123
4. Protest and the Acoustic Limits of Democracy  170
Coda. The Humble Ear and the Shape of Sound  225
Acknowledgments  235
Notes  237
Bibliography  269
Index  289