Northwestern Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (Flashpoints): 26

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, Félix Caignet's invention of the radionovela in Cuba, Evita Perón'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. Review " Acoustic Properties is a wonderful book that ranges impressively across histories of technology, narrative theory, legal history, sound studies, and the hemispheric Americas." --Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island and The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain 1868-1968 "[A] superb study, which combines rigorously revisionist media history with visionary conceptual power to tell the fascinating story of radio's narrative revolutions... a dazzling contribution to media theory, hemispheric studies, and the theory of narrative, among the many other fields for which its profound transmedial insight will be transformative." --The MSA First Book Prize committee "A highly original work of literary criticism, Acoustic Properties brings sound and radio to the forefront of several interlocking transnational literary movements. It should be of interest to multiple audiences, not just in the fields of comparative literature, but also sound studies, cultural history, and media history." --Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction and MP3: The Meaning of a Format About the Author Tom McEnaney is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Cornell University.