Congratulations to Dr. Tamara Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Spanish, for receiving a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (IDG) to assist with her research project titled “Reading with the Ears: The Sounds of Violence in Contemporary Latin American Literature”.
About the research project:
Situated at the intersection of Sound Studies and Literary Studies, “Reading with the Ears” examines 20th- and 21st-century Latin American novels with an ear to listening and sonority in narrative fiction.
In Latin American literary criticism, focus on the sonic has tended to prioritize orality, particularly in the form of testimonio (testimonial texts) analyzed from the perspective of Cultural Studies, and local music (e.g., salsa, bolero) as a sociological-anthropological construct rooted in musicology. In both cases, scholarship on orality and music often centres the legacy of colonialism in the region, attending to questions of postcolonial identity and power structures.
While concern for the cultural and economic legacy of colonialism endures in Latin American literature, recent authors are increasingly shifting their narrative focus to address questions related to the direct and indirect violence that results from the logics of advanced capitalism. “Reading with the Ears” involves the study of literary works that thematize these contemporary concerns by turning to the sonic.
Dr. Mitchell will analyze these texts through the lens of narrative aurality, which refers to the substantive presence, both formally and thematically, of audition and sonority in a work of fiction. Her project shows how narrative aurality attunes the listener-reader to the sonic in a literary text, focalizing the act of listening in/to narrative to generative ends.
The SSHRC IDG will support the composition of her second book project, tentatively titled Sounds of the Capitalocene: Violence and Aurality in Mexican Narrative. In it, she will examine how late-20th- and 21st-century Mexican novels represent and employ sound in fiction as a means of critiquing and responding to advanced capitalism and technological globalization. This project arose from an observation regarding the ways in which recent Latin American literature, and particularly the novel, turns to sound and audition in its portrayal of contemporary social and political realities.
Dr. Mitchell was intrigued by how often authors deployed sound as a literary device in crucial narrative moments or as a means of providing important information to the reader. For instance, one of her proposed chapters will examine the incorporation of “acousmatic sound,” or sound out of view of the protagonist-listener, to address the representation of gender violence and feminicidio in Mexico. In this case, a narrator discovers that her new neighbour’s happy marriage is a façade for an abusive relationship when she hears the muffled sounds of violence through her apartment walls.
In dialogue with thinkers like Julie Beth Napolin, Ren Ellis Neyra, and Michel Chion, the chapter will illustrate how the work’s narrative soundscape becomes a means of giving form to the misogynist social structures that normalize domestic abuse. Dr. Mitchell’s literary analysis shows that out-of-sight does not have to be out-of-mind, and violence that occurs behind closed doors is still perceptible to those willing to listen to it. In this regard, sound becomes the fulcrum point upon which a community of women is able to detect domestic violence and offer support.
This example is emblematic of how literary sound studies is often interdisciplinary and methodologically promiscuous. Above, for instance, Dr. Mitchell borrows the term “acousmatic sound” from Film Studies, which Chion describes as sound whose source is not visible to the listener-viewer (Audio-Vision 72). Much of the early work of “Reading with the Ears” entails identifying fruitful interlocutors from sound-oriented disciplines, such as film studies, ethnomusicology, and media studies to consider alongside contemporary Mexican novels.
Dr. Mitchell expressed gratitude for her two graduate research assistants, FHIS PhD students Pamela Zamora Quesada and Sarah Revilla-Sánchez, who bring their research interests in sound studies to the project and will assist with identifying relevant theoretical interlocutors, creating critical summaries, and locating promising primary works, among other tasks. Beyond the training of graduate students, the IDG supports travel for Mitchell and her GRAs to obtain materials (at the Guadalajara International Book Fair) and present research findings on literary sound studies at conferences.
