Indigenous Media and Sound in Latin America

Catalog description

This course explores how indigenous musics and sounds have been inscribed into ethnographic media. We explore how the notion of indigenous musics arose in the late nineteenth century based on how it was collected and inscribed on specific sound and audiovisual formats, creating a racialized and colonial notion of indigenous musics. Then we explore how indigenous peoples themselves, often in collaborative processes, are decolonizing and appropriating such histories by rethinking the early archives or documenting their own musics and sounds in new ways. In so doing, they challenge Western notions of musicality, of media inscription, of racialized histories of music, and how human and nonhuman sounds are understood. Graduate students: some readings in Spanish.