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Alejandra Bronfman , Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press , 2016), pp. 223, $29.95, pb.
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The Caribbean has long formed an intimate part of a globalising and modernising world. Alejandra Bronfman reminds us that this historical fact, grounded as it is in the story of plantation slavery and the production and distribution of industrial commodities like sugar, extends into the twentieth century in other essential ways. One more recent extension of modernity into the region was via radio. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean, Bronfman argues that although radio technologies comprised an important facet of outsiders' control of the region, they nonetheless displayed the uneven and multidirectional qualities of imperialism. Wireless and broadcasting communications came to the Caribbean soon after their invention and marked the shift from the formal colonial rule of Spain and Britain to the neocolonial power of the United States. Yet local populations - in this study primarily Cuban, Haitian and Jamaican - indigenised new technologies and put them to countervailing uses. A focus on the material artefacts, labour and active listening pursuits around communications technologies, according to Bronfman, decentres the European-American perspective and reveals radio as an unpredictable tool of governance.
Bronfman frames each of her chapters with a metaphor or trope, respectively: circuits, receivers, resistors, voice and ears. 'Circuits' questions how technologies became bound up in the production of knowledge and pursuit of truth during the US military domination of Haiti. 'Receivers' reveals the inherently transnational nature of radio within the Caribbean and between that region and the United States. In 'Resistors' Bronfman, with a light touch, employs the physics of electricity for narratives of how individuals with 'technical expertise' (p. 82) used communications equipment to challenge authoritarian, imperialist and capitalist objectives. In 'Voice' the introduction of radio complicates the politics of language, in...