Aurality

"Aurality shows how hearing, writing, speech, and song were central to the constitution of modern personhood in the nineteenth century. Using Colombia as her grounding point, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier explores the ways that colonial intellectuals, creoles, and indigenous people spoke, sung, and wrote across difference as they struggled to establish new kinds of political subjectivity and nationality. Based in deep, creative readings of primary source materials, and steeped in anthropological and cultural theory, Aurality is an erudite, challenging, and rewarding book. It offers a vital alternative to a literature that has too often taken Western Europe and anglophone North America as points of historical departure. Aurality will transform our understandings of the human and the animal; nation and citizenship; music and language; speech and writing; and modernity itself." With generous voice and incisive ears, Aurality offers us the gift of listening to and through multiple histories, eavesdropping into a Colombian 19th-century archive in whose seemingly muted vociferations Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier hears nothing less than the clamor of the political-sensorial genealogy of the Latin American, Caribbean, and global present. Hearing, listening, speaking, writing, and voicing all emerge here as ontological wagers on life, on personhood, and on human - non-human relations. But this is no celebration of the sonorous, it is a most critically sober and theoretically eloquent call that we listen in order to think Latin American (and global) modernity and coloniality again for the first time.