The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics

by Ren Ellis Neyra

Overview

In The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations-across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral-while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478010111
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/11/2020
Series:	Dissident Acts
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Ren Ellis Neyra is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University and author of Meteor Shower/Días sin Shower.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Ground?  xi
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction: Cry Bomba  1
1. "¡Anormales!": Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa  27
2. "I have been forced to hear a lot": The FALN, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance  55
3. Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Munoz's Cinema  91
4. Slow Lighting, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge  129
Coda, in Three: "fifty-two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky"  163
Notes  171
Bibliography  203
Index  217

Editorial Reviews

In this insightful and creative work, Ren Ellis Neyra centers affect against mandates to perform Latinidad as positivist, representational, and recuperative. Offering substantive methodological, theoretical, and analytical contributions, The Cry of the Senses is primed to reorient the direction of Latinx studies.

Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production - Leticia Alvarado

The Cry of the Senses is at once a poetic, disruptive, and critically demanding work. Ren Ellis Neyra theorizes the ways in which sensorial and material inventiveness, improvisation, and experimental ruptures are primary forms of thought and resistance in the Caribbean. It is a rare and profoundly pleasurable event when a critical work is exemplary of the material practices it explores, itself an eruption, a detour and a break. The work's poetic, expansive theorizing is promiscuous, high-low, feral, committed, and sly. It is a marvelous rearrangement of anticolonial frequencies and geologies, and a delight.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

The Cry of the Senses is at once a poetic, disruptive, and critically demanding work. Ren Ellis Neyra theorizes the ways in which sensorial and material inventiveness, improvisation, and experimental ruptures are primary forms of thought and resistance in the Caribbean. It is a rare and profoundly pleasurable event when a critical work is exemplary of the material practices it explores, itself an eruption, a detour and a break. The work's poetic, expansive theorizing is promiscuous, high-low, feral, committed, and sly. It is a marvelous rearrangement of anticolonial frequencies and geologies, and a delight.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

The Cry of the Senses offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. . . . This is also a beautiful book in its own right that performs what it theorizes: poetic listening to a multifaceted archive that articulates worlds until now only imagined.

Chiricú Journal - Pamela Zamora Quesada

This is a poetic and thought-provoking study.... The Cry of the Senses represents an important contribution to Caribbean and Latinx studies.

Journal of American Studies - Michael Niblett

The Cry of the Senses shows—and, to some extent, argues—that the tools of poetics can be deployed to different ends, in non-totalizing ways. . . . Ellis Neyra demonstrates the creative potential and the conceptual excitement enabled by a more situated, more embodied response to, and examination of, literary and other texts.

Poetics - Sarah Dowling

Rejecting the white, Western focus on reason and the individual, the author foregrounds brownness, Afro-Latinidad, and Blackness to undermine racist and colonialist world views. . . . [The Cry of the Senses] is a rich and relevant text. Recommended.

Choice