Contrapuntos nacionales: sonic identities and reimagining nationhood in the River Plate Region
Creators: name: Herrera, Krysta Pamela
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: “Contrapuntos nacionales: sonic identities and reimagining nationhood in the River Plate Region” investigates the role of music and sound in performances that reject unifying hegemonic identity discourses in Argentina and Uruguay. I argue that sound's ephemeral mobility and generative nature create new possibilities for (re)envisioning exclusionary constructions of race and gender in Argentina and Uruguay. Expanding upon Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as a socially constructed “imagined community,” I employ a sound-based methodology that draws on the works of sound studies scholars such as Brandon LaBelle and Salomé Voegelin, performance scholars such as Diana Taylor and Judith Butler, and media scholars such as Caroline Vernallis to illustrate how historically uncounted individuals, underrepresented, and silenced individuals to fashion acquire agency through “sonic selfhood:” alternative constructions of identity that rearranges habitual assemblages of national culture to foster social empowerment. My first chapter, “Aquí me pongo a cantar: Echoes of Foundational Fictions in Twenty-First-Century Popular Music (2017-2019),” emphasizes how the gaucho’s transformation in popular music reflects the River Plate region’s tradition of self-reflexive critique and scrutiny. I argue that the gaucho’s sudden reappearance into twenty-first-century Argentine and Uruguayan popular music signals a decolonial form of resistance to cultural tropes and identity markers by destabilizing national resistance to acculturation pressures and foregrounding instances of social justice issues amid globalized capitalism. Music and sound allow these groups to create political and social “voices” within exclusionary constructions of nationhood, paving the way for alternative identitarian models that reflect the complex history of the nation and the multi-faceted subjectivities of its inhabitants. Chapter Two, “No tengo la culpa de las cosas malas de este país: Sound, Racial Anxieties, and Redefining National Identity,” investigates how two racialized groups in Argentina—Japanese-Argentines and Venezuelan migrants—negotiate representation by questioning the demarcations of culture and identity around increasingly fluid circulations of capital, media, and people. The Japanese-Argentine band Los Parraleños employs parodic distorsión in their 2002 music video “Megadeth,” undermining the “fixity” of an essentialized, mass-produced Japanese identity by promoting integration and belonging through cultural hybridity rather than as a divisive cultural “remix.” My analysis of the volunteer orchestra Latin Vox Machine investigates print and film portrayals of “sonic encounters” that legitimize Venezuelan migrants’ presence in their host country by establishing their cultural capital. Chapter Three, “Mi cuerpo no es un objeto de consumo: #NiUnaMenos and Audible Activism in Argentina,” explores instances of sonic protest in the recent Argentine feminist #NiUnaMenos movement. Under the collective emblem of el grito, activists’ performances, marches, and digital campaigns complicate a neoliberal post-feminist tendency of reducing Argentina’s femicides to political and social capital by transforming formerly silenced sounds and feelings of grief into resistance. Audible activism invites listeners to think precisely about opening the political imaginary to begin to unpack how, where, and why that gendered violence is structured in Argentina.