About this Book

"In Bridging Sonic Borders, Sharina Maíllo-Pozo focuses on the intersections between Dominican, Caribbean, Afro-diasporic, and U.S. American popular music genres (hip-hop, African-American jazz, blues, pop, and rock, different types of merengue) and literature by authors from different generations who write within the Dominican Republic and the many diasporic spaces of New York in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish (a mixture of English and Dominican Spanish). She dubs novels such as La guaracha del Macho Camacho by Luis Rafael Sánchez (1976) as the beginning of a subgenre of "sonic literary texts that broke away from a long literary tradition in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo that valorized Hispanophilia, heteronormativity, and nation-building." In this study, she examines how migrations and these cultural interactions re-imagine identity with music as a space to think about sound and the uses (and absence, at times) of it. The use and description of music in literature of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the Dominican Republic in particular, from the 1970s onwards deeply shaped new aesthetics and self-expression and it developed a new interest in publishing Caribbean authors in the U.S. For Maíllo-Pozo, music in these texts becomes a way of exploring memory and nostalgia, and a way of situating people in specific spaces while also drawing on a longing for home after immigration. These novels and memoirs were also a place to re-center people who are often invisible: the working class, those of African-descent, rural, and queer people. She moves on to consider literary work in the 1990s and early 2000s that focused on figures such as the iconic rock musician Luis "Terror" Dias' life and music as a way of thinking about the "in-between" identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Memoir and fictional writing by Afro-Dominicanyork Latinas are also a way to explore how the early foundational years of hip hop in New York were a place of freedom and invention while not ignoring the fact that it could also be a place of racialized disenfranchisement for people from many different parts of the Dominican diaspora in the city"--