Sonic Infrastructures

Titled Sonic Infrastructures: National Cinema Imaginaries and the Soundscape of West/South Asia, my first book is under advance contract at the Studies in Music, Sound, and Media series at the University of California Press. It tells the resonant, interconnected history of cinema and other sound technologies between West/South Asia starting at the turn of the 20th century. At this time, European imperialism interacted with the very networks that had historically connected the region, and through which had been shared tales such as those from 1,001 Nights and Majnun Layla to create new dynamics of contact. Canals, roads, trains, shipping routes, and other systems, pressed into the service of empire, also had an inherently sonic dimension, in the sense that they facilitated the circulation of voices of stars mediated by records, radio, and cinema from Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Bombay, and other major cities. Contrary to the stories of national media industries that have endured, my book argues that sonic infrastructures both enabled the movement of sounds across national and regional borders and reified them as well. Sonic infrastructures were dynamic, transregional networks within which struggles unfolded over what the ‘national’ and its stars, bodies, films, and songs meant and sounded like. Embodied female voices made these struggles audible in the ways they dissonated with the rigid dichotomies of modernity with which they were expected to harmonize.