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Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas Volume 26
Contributor(s): McEnaney, Tom (Author)
ISBN: 0810135396     ISBN-13: 9780810135390
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
OUR PRICE:   $98.95  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: June 2017
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Media Studies
- Performing Arts | Radio - History & Criticism
- Literary Criticism | American - Hispanic American
Dewey: 302.234
LCCN: 2016038867
Series: Flashpoints
Physical Information: 1.2" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (1.36 lbs) 328 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Latin America
- Chronological Period - 1930's
- Chronological Period - 1940's
- Chronological Period - 1950's
- Chronological Period - 1960's
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas discovers the prehistory of wireless culture. It examines both the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the various populist political climates in which the emerging medium of radio became the chosen means to produce the voice of the people.

Based on original archival research in Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and the United States, the book develops a literary media theory that understands sound as a transmedial phenomenon and radio as a transnational medium. Analyzing the construction of new social and political relations in the wake of the United States' 1930s Good Neighbor Policy, Acoustic Properties challenges standard narratives of hemispheric influence through new readings of Richard Wright's cinematic work in Argentina, Severo Sarduy's radio plays in France, and novels by John Dos Passos, Manuel Puig, Raymond Chandler, and Carson McCullers. Alongside these writers, the book also explores Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's Radio Rebelde, FDR's fireside chats, F lix Caignet's invention of the radionovela in Cuba, Evita Per n's populist melodramas in Argentina, Orson Welles's experimental New Deal radio, Cuban and U.S. "radio wars," and the 1960s African American activist Robert F. Williams's proto-black power Radio Free Dixie.

From the doldrums of the Great Depression to the tumult of the Cuban Revolution, Acoustic Properties illuminates how novelists in the radio age converted writing into a practice of listening, transforming realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.