Almost a century ago, André Breton quoted a phrase that would come to define the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” In taking this phrase as their motto, the surrealists clearly meant to be provocative, but they also created a new aesthetic machine for modern times. After all, and along with contemporary avant-garde movements, they explicitly sought to subvert traditional knowledges and perceptions. In the early twentieth century, that subversion took place in the arts. Avant-garde movements developed new ways of seeing and new modes of interpreting the world. During modernity, experimental artists and critical intellectuals and philosophers focused on new perceptions.

In his seminal essay “Teoría del complot,” Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia wrote about avant-garde literature, arguing that conspiracy as a practice was an articulation point that connected the building of an alternative reality to the deciphering of the political machine. He argued that what connected avant-garde literature and politics was the artists’ practices, not their political affiliations. In Piglia’s view, radical artists and intellectuals acted as conspirators, or undercover agents who lived in the real world under state law but worked to create experiences alternative to the oppression of the state, the law, and society. Piglia, in a way that recalls Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of surrealism, saw the avant-garde as a political reaction to a repressive and bourgeois modern world. But the innovative perceptions are not limited to the arts space.

The first time I read Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, I was floored, simultaneously attracted by the force of its novelty and rattled by the shock of its new ideas. With this book, Tom McEnaney has created an avant-garde artifact to expand the critical approach to the Americas cultural production from the ’20s to the ’80s with especial focus on the United States, Cuba, and Argentina. McEnaney has remapped the cultural scene of the Americas, introducing new relationships between practices, actors, traditions, languages, laws, and media. Although the objects of his book do not usually go together, it is not chance that brings them together, but rather a strong logic that McEnaney uses to weave an intricate web of arguments, ideas, and conclusions. Radio connected a variegated community of writers, entrepreneurs, boxers, activists, filmmakers, and poets at different key moments in the history of modern Transamerican relationships. As McEnaney says: “Following writers, activists, and performers across this new neighborhood of the Americas, I identify a series of aesthetic and political connections unrecognized by official histories, and I reveal how the idea of the neighborhood operated to connect the micropolitical problems of local and physically proximate neighbors to the transnational, or ‘hemispheric,’ geopolitical neighborhood defined the Good Neighbor Policy’s treaties and trade” (13). These new relationships were registered primarily in literature. As spies or undercover agents, literary writers could see the secret plots between popular and lettered cultures. There is an idea of what literature is and how it functions.

Although the book explores numerous phenomena linked to radio, including the voice and national and international regulations, it focuses on the ways that the new aural, legal, and cultural context transformed the codes of realist narrative. Once mass culture had appropriated the representation machine, the entire representational system shifted. According to McEnaney, realism was at the core of twentieth-century literary inquiries, as the “realism” of new technologies encouraged literature to explore its own formal process of construction. He concludes that a new realism moved away from the visuality of (Latin)American narrative productions toward no-literary zones in the political context of the Americas. He convincingly traces a line from the New Deal (US) to populism (Peronismo in Argentina) and revolution (Cuba). Although they are not the same thing, these movements and events created agents and conditions to negotiate (in the economic and cultural meaning of the word) the new conditions of representation (in the political and aesthetic meaning of the word).

In most Western traditions, twentieth-century literary modernity was understood as a “literary” phenomenon, with traditional critics approaching literature as if its writers were isolated in their own practice, as if they read only literature. In Acoustic Properties, McEnaney designs a different place for literature (and literary critics). Modern literature negotiates its voice and its aesthetics with a variety of practices that belong to different realms. Real estate and realism are not “natural” relatives, but their logics—in McEnaney’s hands—are synchronizable. I think the most valuable aspect of this book is its capacity to develop new ways of reading. It shows that a creative and critical reading must build a “logic” of interpretation, instead of simply arriving at a conclusion. I want to insist on this point because, aside from its innovative ideas, solid arguments, and brilliant close readings, this book offers a sort of machine for understanding regional dynamics and the transactions between politics and culture. And it makes representation the crucial term at its very center.

McEnaney highlights the importance of representation when he interprets the fictional narratives of John Dos Passos, Carson McCullers, Julio Cortázar, and Severo Sarduy, among many others. Although these writers come from different literary traditions, they share some common concerns (the limits of private life, the relationship between intellectuals and the public sphere, and the process of building new subjectivities, for instance). Fiction, aesthetics, economics, the culture industry, technology, and politics intertwine in their voices and powers in very different ways. McEnaney demonstrates the convergences between them by analyzing a few privileged objects, including the pre-revolutionary Cuban radionovela. His approach to “El derecho de nacer,” the most popular radionovela, is not limited to untangling its complex web of racial and gender relationships in an uneven and dependent society. He takes the genre beyond its content and reads it as a social and political phenomenon: “The U.S. commercial influence in Cuba found its most powerful conduit in radio advertising aired during Cuban radionovelas. These advertisements, primarily from U.S. cleaning supply manufacturers who bought airtime to sell their households goods to the largely female and domestic audience that listened to the melodramatic afternoon programs, eventually gave their names to the genre of ‘soap operas’” (121). Imperialist pressure apparently intersected with highly local phenomena.

McEnaney does not, however, remain in a comfort zone of popular cultural productions. Because culture is continuous, not a series of isolated works, McEnaney moves from popular culture to avant-garde practices. He examines the case of the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy. Sarduy, in exile in France, both created experimental literature and contributed to radio scripts, thereby changing the cultural contract between sophisticated writers, big audiences, writerly authority, and culture as property. McEnaney concludes: “To be yet more specific, we might say that for Sarduy the anti-colonial project hinges on the voice, whereas the colonial project emerges from dialogue’s insistence on the pronoun I” (158). These avant-garde works altered the grammatical system and social relations. Radio is a place to exercise the exploration of the new but it is also a scene where writers and artists could intervene in political ways: “. . . voice becomes inseparable from sound. It is precisely this space of sonic-social indexicality that Sarduy will manipulate in his attempt to decolonize the voice” (157).

In selecting objects and events for analysis from an overcrowded political and cultural scene, McEnaney makes smart choices. The book begins with a transnational event and its consequences: “The first transnational radio broadcast in the Americas was the 1923 fight between Jack Dempsey —the United States heavyweight champion of the world—and his Argentine challenger, Luis Ángel Firpo. Broadcast from New York City’s Polo Grounds, the transmission reached listeners in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States” (3). In McEnaney’s reading, this episode illuminates a complex web of implications: the new role of sports in mass societies, duels and the glorification of strength, the appeal to the nation in international contexts, popular phenomena as cultural events, and the divisions that mass culture created in modern life. Cultural events are not inert. Representation is again at the center of an analysis that problematizes the political dimension of entertainment, the voice, and language.

Forty years later, radio voices populate everyday life in the Americas, not as special or high-profile events, but rather as constant background noise. Some artists and writers take advantage of the aural unconscious, exploring mass society’s new subjectivities and politicizing the disciplinary role of mass media. The Argentinian writer Manuel Puig was one such artist, and he expanded ongoing experiments with voices and recorded words. According to McEnaney: “Puig realizes a formal principle: imitating the speech patterns of immigrants amounts to representing the insinuation of radio speech into the newly forming language. The author’s role is not to explain, but rather to listen and record” (176). Literature develops new ways to represent voices in increasingly homogeneous societies.

McEnaney argues that this variety of narrative resources was a way to replicate the conflicts of the modern representational model in the Americas. He is able to find how—as some characters in Piglia’s novels—the “connections between the personal, the national and the imperial—a network of relations already threated into the social conditions of broadcast technology´s engineering—also links the apparently local scene to a more general historical and conceptual affiliation with radio” (210).

Nelly Richard, one of Latin America’s most prestigious critics, has written that critics who seek to change the circuits of reproduction of power must be attentive to the most vulnerable zones and breaks in the dominant systems. Acoustic Properties is an excellent example of this defiant approach. These vulnerable zones, however, are not necessarily hidden deep in the social tissue; in contrast, they can be extremely visible, naturalized practices. The critic helps us uncover the secret connections between different objects that reside in these zones. McEnaney is opening the field of Transamerican studies, media studies, literary criticism. In this book, he successfully expands the boundaries of what we knew but also of what we want to know.

Tom McEnaney’s Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas comprises, in the author’s own words, “a prehistory of our wireless culture” (vii). It is a study of how, in the age of radio, writers in the United States, Cuba, and Argentina listened and taught us to listen, creating a feedback loop between print and audio culture that constantly crossed, while not fully transcending, national boundaries. The book itself serves as a model for how to listen closely, as its attention to the nuances of radio voices reminds us how important tone and timbre and accent are for the creation of belonging (and its opposite: exclusion)—or, to use the idiom of this study, of neighborliness (and its opposite: hostility).

At the end of the book’s preface, McEnaney expresses his desire that readers might use this book as an impetus to “continue seeking out new resources in sustained actions against control” (ix). This invitation seems to harbor a claim: If, as Acoustic Properties demonstrates, how we listen to the world shapes the ways we write about it, then as long as we keep listening and writing—and in the present, these actions remain central both for the administration of capital and in the resistance to it—then there are valuable lessons to be learned from the history of sound. I agree wholeheartedly, and as such, in what follows I’d like to highlight a few moments in the text that seem particularly important for understanding our present-day soundscape—and for transforming it.

A recent article about Spotify can serve as a useful backdrop for my comments. Writing in the Baffler, Liz Pelly draws parallels between the music-streaming service and the elevator sounds of Muzak. Spotify, according to Pelly, is likely to go public in the first half of 2018. It has attracted plenty of venture capital, and yet it has an important weakness when compared to its rivals in the streaming business: Both Apple and Amazon, Pelly notes, use inexpensive access to music as a way to rope listeners into a broader ecology of products (“overpriced, fun-sized plastic and metal surveillance machines”), but there is no such equivalent for Spotify. Its selling point, on the contrary, is the bounty of data it has gathered about listeners’ habits, data that can then be used to transform our behavior. This happens primarily, in practice, through a specific genre of music: the emotionally attuned playlist.

Although Spotify’s catalog is vast, Pelly identifies “chill,” in particular, as the preferred affective register of this apparatus of listening: “Spotify loves ‘chill’ playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect.” This attention to emotional dispositions (including those that go beyond “chill”), generates specific sorts of listening practices:

It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll.

Who is this listener? Most likely one among “an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists.” And how does all this affect the sorts of music that get promoted? Pelly quotes the answer of one independent label owner to this question: “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify.”

I happened upon this article as I finished reading McEnaney’s book. This coincidence underscored, for me, the importance of the sonic landscape in the fashioning of political common sense. Because the material properties of sound are distinct from those of sight or touch, for example, they can alternately envelop or invade human perception in ways unlike other sense experiences. As such, the attention McEnaney gives to the changing tone of official political speech in the United States during and after the Great Depression, or to the use of racialized dialects in Cuban radionovelas, or to the Argentine state’s suppression of the linguistic practices of immigrants, matters greatly. It has the effect of delimiting a battleground. I mean this term literally: Acoustic Properties effectively demonstrates that, in the hands of large corporations or of the governments that are symbiotic with them (but which one is the crocodile and which the plover bird?), and likewise in the hands of those who would resist military-industrial control, radio became a weapon in the political struggles of the twentieth century. We should suppose that our present-day soundscape is no less important for today’s struggles.

McEnaney presents the Good Neighbor Policy, begun under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a framework through which to understand the political economy of radio in the Americas during the twentieth century. This “extension and revision of the Monroe Doctrine” made ample use of radio technology and placed the United States’ global ambitions at the center of statecraft throughout the Americas (12). The metaphor of the neighbor, furthermore, calls attention to the concrete circumstances of convivencia (a word whose closest equivalents in English, cohabitation and coexistence, are inadequate translations). That is, if US policy toward Latin America is to be conceived in terms of neighborliness, then we might imagine the geopolitics of the region as large-scale versions of the practices of neighbors—borrowing and lending, acknowledging or ignoring, welcoming or shunning, caring or harming. At stake is the general question of how we occupy space together. Or, put less abstractly, if I play the radio at this volume, will it annoy the neighbors upstairs? And what if, instead of turning it down, I turn it up even louder?

Neighbors struggle over the norms and rules that govern any given neighborhood. Similarly, the writers that McEnaney analyzes seek to fashion alternatives to the property relations, from housing policy to national sovereignty, characteristic of the era of the Good Neighbor Policy. By paying close attention to their aesthetic practices, we may learn how best to offer alternatives to the reigning orthodoxies of the present era, when radio and an ideology of paternalistic neighborliness have been supplanted by digital streaming and the habitus of thuggish stupidity.

In the United States, for example, McEnaney notes the transformation of realist codes in Raymond Chandler’s fiction. Comparing Chandler with French antecedents like Flaubert and Balzac, this analysis changes emphasis among the senses: from sight to hearing, with the latter coupled to proprioception. McEnaney builds on previous work by Fredric Jameson to make this point:

Although Jameson remains silent as to how this alteration in realism might occur, we can understand Chandler’s shift from furnishings to the rooms that contain them as a change in perception, from the eye to the ear. When Marlowe enters a building looking for clues, he hears something else entirely: “I went farther into the room and stood peering around and listening and hearing nothing except those fixed sounds belonging to the house and having nothing to do with the humans in it.” Disrupting realism’s inherited design code, Chandler moves away from the intimate possession of things and toward the aural attention to spaces. Realism here has less to do with how people possess and are possessed by their things than how buildings produce their own sounds. (62)

At the level of the “inherited design code” of realism, then, Chandler emphasizes buildings, instead of the objects contained in them. He orients his readers’ attention toward the delineation of space and toward the sonic and proprioceptive experiences that accompany it.

In post-Revolutionary Cuba, Robert F. Williams’s Radio Free Dixie took advantage of radio’s capacity to cross national borders, as his English-language broadcasts critiqued racial politics in the Jim Crow South, reaching listeners all over the United States. The broadcasts, McEnaney points out, included music features as well, incorporating both jazz and soul into a broader critique of racism:

With a keen understanding of radio’s unique capacity to balance words and music, political commentary about African American life throughout the United States and the musical revolution led by African American musicians, Williams helped provide the soundtrack for the civil rights movement. (148)

This observation brought to my mind the CIA’s deployment of jazz as a weapon abroad on the cultural fronts of the Cold War, something that makes clear the importance of context in the elaboration of any message. It also adds depth to the ultimate fate of Radio Free Dixie in Cuba: “Williams’s support for jazz, and his refusal to advocate for socialism in his broadcasts . . . ultimately distanced him from the increasingly dogmatic Communist line in Cuba” (151). He would leave Cuba in 1966.

Finally, in the analysis of Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente, we find important differences between radio and tape recordings. Seen against the backdrop of a national radio culture that had, decades earlier, sought to standardize the national radio voice, Piglia’s representation of tape exchange represents a rebellious alternative:

Piglia takes up the cassette tape as a hybrid technology that exists only through the remediation of the radio and the phonograph and attempts to use the newer medium of tape to rethink radio’s political history. The turn to tape restructures the idea of the radio network, moving it away from the single broadcasting station and toward an underground community of rebel listeners making hand-to-hand deliveries. (214)

The people involved in this system of exchange thus reconstitute a sort of network, one with many active nodes (much like early radio culture), unlike the one-to-many model of the standard radio broadcast.

Chandler, Williams, Piglia—these are only three names among many that McEnaney weaves together to create an uncommon study of sound culture in the Americas. I highlight these cases in particular because they portray cultural labor within a system of restraints. In all three, we find writers (or a broadcaster, in Williams’s case) redirecting our attention to both the limits and the possibilities of their own moment in the history of sound. We engage with form and content, but we are simultaneously drawn to the infrastructure beneath.

The question of infrastructure brings us back to the example of Spotify and present-day modes of governance. What sort of alternatives can be fruitfully pursued against digitally enabled capitalism? On the one hand, Acoustic Properties emphasizes that space is central for any form of governance, and that battles over sound are ultimately about the uses of space. But something else that this eloquent study brings to mind is how infrastructure so often lays the bases for unforeseen future developments. The commercial radio networks that broadcast Cuban radionovelas, themselves vehicles for advertising for American products, were not “supposed to” conduct programs like Radio Free Dixie, and yet following the Cuban Revolution, for a few years they would. In a different direction, the increasing commingling of commercial and military interests in the development of the Internet is today bundling entertainment with surveillance, something that was not inherent or obvious in the original design. We should be careful and imaginative (even paranoid, perhaps), in other words, about what future forms of control are potentially made possible by any given technology. We should also, following the example of the cultural producers studied in Acoustic Properties, cultivate literary alternatives—in sound and sight, and also in space and time—to today’s digital tools of governance.

Tom McEnaney reads for how authors listen, and listens for spoken words that reach across oceans and cities, designating what he has elegantly construed as a neighborhood of the Americas in search of the “contagious and unofficial” vox populi. Acoustic Properties is a book that puts a slew of texts, broadcasts, and their authors alongside one another, among them Julio Cortázar, John Dos Passos, Che Guevara, and Severo Sarduy. All of them have something to say, some way to listen. Guevara, doctor and revolutionary, framed radio as etiology: “At moments when war fever is more or less palpitating in everyone in a region or country, the inspiring burning word increases this fever and communicates it to every one of the future combatants.”1 Radio voices, networks, and spaces of listening, writes McEnaney, profoundly motivated Dos Passos. U.S.A. reimagines a nation connected to Buenos Aires, Cuba, the Caribbean and Mexico, via empire and business, both of which came together as radio mushroomed throughout the Americas.2 Fewer women wrote about radio (one wonders why), but female voices nevertheless prompted new ways to listen as they drew attention to the interplay of race, class, identity, and performance, generating controversy and adoration. To be sure, some of the texts and voices in Acoustic Properties are familiar, but how often have they been situated in a neighborhood of the Americas, all engaged in overlapping conversations about what the Americas is or what it should be and in particular what its sound is?

Intriguingly, Acoustic Properties dwells on the relationship between radio and property, and specifically housing. This is not necessarily an intuitive set of connections, but McEnaney makes their relevance clear. Playing with notions of real estate and housing in both literal and metaphoric dimensions, he notes the ways that sound both passes through enclosed spaces and helps to render them meaningful. He also thinks about the social and political conflicts over property, segregation and inequality that accompanied and shaped the emergence of broadcasting as a domestic medium. At stake is whether this led to a critique of private property or an affirmation of the primacy of the home to both politicians and corporations in search of loyal, regular audiences. In any case they all contributed to the making of sonic neighborhoods, spaces that capitalism created, and through which it might be disassembled.

The book moves from the space of homes to the neighborhood of the Americas. I think that one could linger, as well, in between. The further I read, the more interested I became in another space that is necessary to the creation of a neighborhood, the space of the street. As legal definitions remind us, there is an essential relationship between neighbors and boundaries; the bounding of a property necessarily creates a neighbor. The street, where those boundaries end, is a space that has a relationship to property and possession that are more ambiguous and as such analogous to McEnaney’s imagined neighborhood of the Americas: not necessarily neatly apportioned and tightly bounded, but rather fluid, porous, with no clear archive of possession, title or ownership, and readily used and claimed by a variety of actors. The street is precisely what turns a collection of houses into a neighborhood. It is a space of gossip, play, conflict, and community.

The traditions of street listening and sounding are long and sturdy. Many of McEnaney’s own subjects relied on its revolutionary potential. Cuban politicians Eddy Chibás and Fidel Castro hoped their voices would move people out of their houses and into the street, and when they did it was a sign of success. In the days of unreliable listener surveys, the physical manifestation of the crowd was proof of a listening public. Photographs of Chibás’ funeral in Havana in 1951 document streets crowded with listeners/fans mourning the loss of a voice fighting corruption, an idealistic voice that Chibás himself had extinguished by committing suicide, believing that he had not done enough to rouse Cubans in the fight against corruption.3 In José Antonio Echeverría’s ill-fated call to citizens to rise up against Batista’s regime, the army and its tanks materialized and took control of the streets, terrorizing any opposition that might have appeared.4

Tropical weather means that boundaries between houses and streets are precisely where the action takes place; on balconies, in doorways, sidewalks, the “yards” as they are called in the West Indies. In Buenos Aires, the uprising directed by Evita Perón in support of her husband and future president, Juan Perón, may have called attention to the housing crisis in Argentina, but it was at the same time a claiming of a street and a fountain in the center of the city. The throng of protesters redesignated a neighborhood of privilege as a neighborhood of the people. For them, the neighborhood of the Americas they envisioned necessarily included public spaces they might inhabit without shame or fear. Broadcasters recognized that, and many of them put loudspeakers outside their stations, or set them up in street corners. Businesses had radios, and people often stopped on sidewalks to listen.

McEnaney notes that in Severo Sarduy’s The Ant-Killers, much anticolonial listening takes place outside: “in corner stores, in cars, at military barracks on barren paths, the play’s diegetic radios blare out with music and news of Angola’s independence movements, announcing the invasion of the empire’s soundscape with the sounds of the periphery.”5 Indeed, Sarduy, a Cuban exile writing in Paris suggests that travel between metropole and periphery are at the heart of decolonization. In other words, voices without homes are what are going to decolonize the stability of the colonial “I.”6 So much of the action in The Ant-Killers takes place on a bridge, or under the bridge. A bridge is both part of the built environment and the street, it crosses and connects, it is ambiguously owned, it is indispensable.

In thinking about this I turned to Kamau Brathwaite, who has written about the radio as a “bridge of sound.”7 In much of his work the Jamaican poet, critic, and essayist tunes in to sound and the borders it crosses and creates. He expands the notion of neighborhood. Brathwaite’s soundings connect technology, home, nature, and the world of the dead. As Loretta Collins notes, spirits and broadcasts were often channeled through the same medium. Brathwaite uses an “analogy to the radio to suggest the vibrational energy channeled from the crossroads of space to the living earth.”8 And indeed, in his work voices arrive from space, or from the world of the dead, or are generated by the sea or the earth. Far-flung voices get transmitted to radio-listeners, and they are “intimate, invasive, infiltrating and mediated.”9

Perhaps there is a way to open a conversation about the poetic genre alongside the novel, to see what it yields in terms of this line of inquiry about the spaces of home and the people’s voice. As Acoustic Properties suggests, once you start listening to texts, and seeking out the spaces they inhabit or conjure, the possibilities multiply. I loved the way the book ranges across media. Film, theater, television, novels, and radio plays are all in radio’s orbit. Perhaps poetry as well. Maybe now more than ever. As Philip Nanton suggests, citing Nick Laird, poetry nurtures complexity and in so doing is “at the far end of the verbal scale from the demagogue’s three-word phrases framed as hoarse imperatives.”10

In Brathwaite’s Kumina, a woman mourns the death of her son. Sound flows through the poem, from the ominous “singing blade” to the quiet she experiences, as she tells him, “on the first day of your death,” to the sounding beings that mark his death in different ways:

[EXT]On the fifth day after your death, a young white rooster. White white white feathery and shining tail and tall neighbor of sound from miles away in the next village.

On the sixth day after your death. There is this silence of flowers their petals say their shining needs.11

For Brathwaite, the neighborhood is noisy, and he listens all the time. Sounds make space, and they don’t respect many boundaries: inside, outside, living, dead, nature, “culture”; whatever the binary, sound flows between and through. It is not decolonizing listening as much as placing sound at the center and observing what flows from it. The vox populi, for Brathwaite, speaks from many sources, and we do well to heed them. It seems a point of departure for the expansion of the neighborhood. For what is a neighborhood without flowers, streets, and the occasional crowing rooster?

Last summer, just as Tom McEnaney published his sensational new book Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Administrative Building and Research Tower at the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin. Alas, my amazement at Wright’s historic achievements in midcentury corporate campus design abruptly fizzled when our tour culminated at a newer building, Norman Foster’s Fortaleza Hall, completed in 2010. That is because Foster provides SC Johnson with a gaudy monument to the self-mythologizing, Midwest supercapitalists who made their fortunes removing resources from underfoot of South American communities. In the sun-drenched atrium, a wood mosaic map of the American hemisphere ornaments a glossy, antiseptic floor. Although sourced from “sustainably harvested” local wood, the map evokes an exotic history of mahogany extraction. Above it dangles the replica of a Sikorsky-38 amphibious plane for which Foster built this glorified hangar. In 1935, Johnson Wax company chairman Herbert Fisk “Hib” Johnson Jr. christened one such Sikorsky the Carnauba, and piloted it from Wisconsin to Fortaleza, Brazil, a corporate katabasis meant to aggrandize his establishment of a wax plantation.1 Call it Fordlandia for flooring buffs.2 In 1998, Hib’s son Sam commissioned the replica in order to retrace his father’s footsteps, completing this family-owned company’s neocolonial torch-passing ritual. Hovering in Fortaleza Hall, the Sikorsky dwarfs the map with all the cartoon solemnity of Pedro the Baby Airplane, who, in Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos, “has to fly the mail all by himself, because his papa has a cough.”3

Also in 1935, Hib Johnson first hipped to the national advertising game of radio sponsorship. “The Johnson Wax Program with Fibber McGee and Molly,” a husband-and-wife sitcom broadcast from Chicago on the NBC Red Network, would become one of the most popular and enduring US radio programs of the era. In the folksy community of Wistful Vista, Fibber’s cornball Nebraskan puns and Molly’s no-nonsense, Irish-accented responses (“t’aint funny, McGee!”) voiced the populist humor of a nation subordinating its domestic life to corporate advertisements with new alacrity. Fibber habitually misidentifies the announcer Harlow Wilcox as “Car Wax,”4 and Wilcox in turn calls out imperatives to the house orchestra that double as instructions for housewives applying Glo-Coat to the linoleum: “Pour it on, Rico!”5

The technological forms of spatial compression, through which the outsized appeals of a few floor polish moguls calling themselves “good neighbors” could loom over and shoot through hemispheric airspace, structure what McEnaney identifies in his book title as “the new neighborhood of the Americas.” McEnaney’s Acoustic Properties rewards its readers with numerous kinds and qualities of insight (especially in the domains of media theory and literary interpretation), but, crucially, he also begins to recapture a key dimension of the hemisphere’s schizoid history. That is, McEnaney helps us to see the Janus faces of an era defined by hemispheric commerce and plunder at one and the same moment as its radios amplified the vocal tones and accents of populist narratives securing the boundaries of American communities. Across the first several chapters of his book, McEnaney calls this “New Deal Acoustics,” charting the intertwinement of radio’s early history with Pan-American commercial interests, populist narrative forms, and housing works. Later, in some of the book’s most riveting chapters, he traces these networks south to Cuba and then to Argentina, both before and after Fidel Castro and Juan Perón. In McEnaney’s telling, hemispheric radio history comes together in fractured but nonetheless luminous details, mimicking what he calls “the medium’s fractured capacity for collectivity” (75).

For instance, long before the intimate national radio public he sought to forge in the Fireside Chats, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s World War I stint as assistant secretary to the Navy included a scheme to collaborate with United Fruit Company on an early set of transnational relays, laying the groundwork for the rise of NBC at Rockefeller Center. After these early US dispatches to banana republics, radio would in every instance become “the transnational medium par excellence” (10), for wherever a Border Blaster or pirate radio station set up shop to dodge FCC regulations, or wherever US shortwave hawked commodities south, “the transnational precedes the national” (11). Yet, as McEnaney convincingly demonstrates, Rockefeller Center and the acoustic architecture of Radio City Music Hall also structured the national style of US New Deal fiction. This new “kaleidosonic” (48) social space controls the social realism of John Dos Passos, who witnessed some of this early “national hookup” (25) and envisioned U.S.A.’s character system in terms of a radio network; it inflects Carson McCullers’s and Richard Wright’s narratives in the interiors of New Deal housing works; and it accounts for long-debated questions about the style of Wright’s dialogue. These and other New Deal novelists falsify György Lukács’s theories of realism with ingenious strategies for vocalizing the radiophonic dimensions of social totality, offering new “versions of the vox populi” (52).

In McEnaney’s deft close readings and even defter exercises in listening, what he calls a “narrative acoustics” (8) emerges, producing recursive and “entextualized” meanings in the circuits between sound, speech, and writing. Acoustic Properties therefore presents an “intersectional poetics of radio history and literary theory” (9), in league with recent works by Mark Goble, Damien Keane, and Neil Verma, among others. Of course, for literary scholars who are trained to find satisfaction in bravura readings, we may be accustomed to seeing McEnaney’s keen reading method as the aesthetic payoff that warrants his investigations into the underlying historical contexts. And certainly, McEnaney’s readings are uniformly rewarding. To take only one example, the model of “enregistered” speech he borrows from linguistic anthropology leads him to a real breakthrough in the analysis of novelistic character space. And the readings grow ever more nuanced and illuminating as he tracks his narrative to the effects of Cuban radio’s history of “forked address” (116) to Cuba and the United States, and further still to the debates over Argentine language behind radiophonic statements, stories and novels by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Ricardo Piglia.

Yet, if I were to issue a lone demurral about McEnaney’s book, it might be that the profusion of great readings pushes to the margins radio’s corporate history—a history whose stakes are inevitably a bit muckraking. These alternative stakes come to mind wherever McEnaney in passing draws the reader’s attention to the Hib Johnson-like chairmen of the radio corporations. For example, when McEnaney describes Orson Welles’s inter-American radio program at CBS, Hello Americans (1942), which Welles pitched to Nelson Rockefeller as “the best way ‘to sell South America to North America,’” he includes this fascinating backstory:

The program’s message of Pan-Americanism made historical sense at CBS. The network’s founder, Samuel Paley, had begun his career in the United States as a lector in a Chicago cigar factory, following the Cuban tradition of reading novels, magazines, and newspapers to the cigar rollers. When he began his own cigar company, from which he soon made millions, Paley purchased the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System to advertise his La Palina cigars, and his son, William S. Paley, transformed the consortium of radio stations into one of the country’s major broadcasting networks. (54)

Not mere context, this passage is also a good example of McEnaney’s attentions to different codes of speech as they work their way through circuits binding literature to labor, commerce to Hertzian communication. The fact that so much of the broadcast infrastructure had been set up to saturate the airwaves of the Americas with the interests and advertisements for the United States’ wealthiest stogie merchants, hailing an entire hemisphere into an intensified stage of consumer capitalism, is no small fact of radio history. “Chesterfield is merely the nation’s cigarette, but the radio is its mouthpiece,” wrote Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their scathing indictment of the radio as a wing of “the culture industry.”6 I find Acoustic Properties especially riveting at these margins, where it sets its sights on a cast of characters like Paley and Rockefeller, or, later, on the Cuban food wholesaler turned radio tycoon Goar Mestre (who decamps for Argentina when Castro seizes state control of the NBC-affiliated station CMQ to set up Radio Rebelde, providing one of the many tissues of connection that McEnaney artfully tracks between three national situations).

Perhaps the most compelling of these moments occurs in chapter 4, entitled “Tears in the Ether: The Rise of the Radionovela.” This chapter explores “the creation of a new narrative genre—the radionovela—meant to sell U.S. goods to Cuban consumers” (117), especially cleaning supplies to women at home, and therefore a progenitor of the melodramatic “soap opera” (121). The genre’s most distinctive innovator was Félix B. Caignet, who got his start adapting Hollywood adaptations of Charlie Chan novels for Cuban radio, pioneering the devices of a narrator and a serial format. By July 1948, Caignet’s radio novel El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born) had caused such a national stir that Cuban citizens “halted every afternoon to hear if Don Rafael del Junco, a plantation owner in the country’s eastern city of Santiago, would recover from the mysterious illness that had left him mute, and admit that he was indeed the grandfather of the Havana doctor Alberto Limonta” (124). All across the island, “¿ya habló Don Rafael?” (has Don Rafael spoken?) became the national refrain, a Cuban counterpoint to “t’aint funny, McGee!”

McEnaney tracks the importance of this drawn out, emotional climax to a staggering number of contexts, such as its renegotiation of the negrismo performance cultures represented by Eusebia Cosme, and its influence on famous Boom novelist including Gabo himself. But the crux of the matter is a labor dispute that gives voice to Caignet’s device of narrative suspension. When the voice actor José Goula, playing the decisive character of Don Rafael, realized that the whole plot revolved around his big reveal, “Goula decided to go on strike until his salary was increased” (132). Goar Mestre ordered Caignet to fire Goula, but instead of carrying out the retaliation, Caignet developed a narrative twist that held the labor dispute in limbo while driving up the listenership: Don Rafael’s extended silence. Horkheimer and Adorno might have again viewed this device skeptically: “The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged.”7 But McEnaney sees it as a two-way channel: “In Don Rafael’s muffled voice of plantation power one could hear Mestre’s stifled business demands, and a minor victory in a worker’s labor struggles, but also a sound that produced further profits for Mestre and his advertisers. It is the sound of art under capitalism: the dialectic of resistance and containment” (132).

Subsequent chapters of McEnaney’s book suggest that the network set up by the commercial conglomerates could be requisitioned by populist states and anticolonial insurgencies, and put to a variety of ends beyond the peddling of consumer goods, from Castro’s Radio Rebelde to Robert F. Williams’s “Radio Free Dixie” program. Thus by the 1960s, the signals were awash in what McEnaney variously calls “hemispheric noise” and “transnational interference” (146) of many kinds. McEnaney records many extreme examples of that noise, such as the startling sound of Cuban radio personality and Castro mentor Eddie Chibás in 1951, committing suicide mid-broadcast in the belief that it would launch the revolution. But to my ears, the special power of this book comes at those moments when the endless wash of “sponsored content” comes to the fore, and, like the silence of Don Rafael, mutates through McEnaney’s analysis into the sounds of labor struggles and wars of position. In such moments, we might all learn to listen just like McEnaney.

Radio is to international propaganda what the airplane is to international warfare.

—Dorothy Thompson, 1934

The situation of radio today is the situation of poetry backwards. Poetry is an art without an audience, and radio is an audience without an art.

—Archibald MacLeish, 1939

Like pantomime, one of the oldest literary forms, the radio play reaches us through the channel of a single sense.

—Carl Van Doren, 1939

 

I begin with these well-known chestnuts about broadcasting to illustrate how haphazard many attempts by middlebrow critics to name radio’s literary “other” were during the 1930s, the decade when the medium arrived at the center of modern life in many parts of the Americas. Propaganda, poetry, pantomime: the three P’s articulated by these critics seldom go together, and it’s hardly obvious they truly triangulate the “situation” of radiophonic expression. What’s more, these proposals never laid down roots; in the current generation of radio-studies scholarship none of these forms are considered significant in contrast or insightful in likeness to radio. Since the 1990s radio studies has thrived mainly in film & media studies departments, extracting the medium from decades in the clutches of communication studies. As a result of this change, we have grown accustomed to understanding radio in contradistinction to film and television rather than to literary arts, an approach that’s illuminating when it comes to finding interconnections between the media industries, but one that is also sometimes misleading in its anachronism and adoption of jargon that was really devised to be used in visual analysis by cinephiles.

Notably absent in these discussions, then and now, is the novel. Until the last fifteen years or so little detailed work on the interpenetration of literary and radio aesthetics existed. And although many thousands of dramas actually broadcast during the radio age were derived from books—literary classics from Shakespeare to Poe, modernist works like Lowry’s Under the Volcano or Hemingway’s The Killers, bestsellers like du Maurier’s Rebecca and Hersey’s A Bell for Adano and a host of dime novels—only briefly in discussion among radio professionals do we find reflections that coordinate the culture of the airwaves with that of the codex. During the radio age, professionals tended to liken their work to theatrical fare, importing whole genres and modalities of patter, along with terminologies, address conventions and modes of operation from vaudeville and legit theater.1 Most discussions about how radio and the novel texture one another—books like Erik Barnouw’s 1947 Handbook of Radio Writing and Milton Kaplan’s 1950 Radio and Poetry—tended to come out late in the era. But tardiness isn’t the only problem when it comes to finding a concept of radio’s appropriate “other.” A deeper one is the lack of agenda. While Thompson, MacLeish and Van Doren are clearly being provocative above, their provocations are spent once they are made. What, after all, is the pairing of radio with another medium supposed to explicate? In the century of its history, radio theory has had a hard time with that question, and so even its canniest insights are frustrated by a paucity of outcome.

That situation is what made McEnaney’s Acoustic Properties such an exciting read to me. It not only makes the mutual registration of radio and the novel, but it shows how the history of that relationship is also the history of describing and contesting the neighborhood of the Americas through imagined and real acoustic territories. I know of no other book so scrupulous in showing how intimate radiophonic publics populate the novel in this period, or so insightful in linking things like the use of radio as the voice of power in Richard Wright’s work and the use of radio to represent the political voice and its articulation in Cuba. Thanks to McEnaney, not only can we can hear radiophonic sensibilities in the nonreferential elements of speech in Dos Passos and key tropes about the radio as the voice of radiophonic populism in McCullers, but we are able to hear the medium’s ambiguous relation to the possession and dispossession of spaces across the Americas. In Acoustic Properties, radio’s relation to the novel and vice versa is not simply promulgated, in other words, it has projects on its hands.

In this response, I’d like to focus on just one of those projects, something that’s tucked in the background of McEnaney’s narrative but which emerges regularly as he discusses echoic aspects of novels—what we might call the politics of “verberant” modernism. In his recently translated “acoulogical treatise” on sound, Michel Chion suggests reviving the dormant term “verberation” to refer to sound, one that borrows from acoustics to indicate a wave that emerges from the “shaking” of a body in space, and thus emphasizes the way a vibration traverses a medium of air to produces a sound in an ear’s membrane and other bodily sites of reception.2 Verberation is more specific than the more broadly explored category of vibration, which Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower among others have used in relation to modernist writing, and it also suggests what we might think of as a post-Cartesian concept of resonance, which Viet Erlmann has argued concluded in the middle of the radio age in 1928 with the work of von Békésy in the sciences and Heidegger in philosophy.3 For Chion, verberation is relational and physical; it also calls attention to another phenomenon on which modernism in particular fixated—reverberation. As McEnaney points out following historian Emily Thompson, the decline of reverb in architecture for the sake of communications efficiency was a hallmark of many sound environments in the radio age (McEnaney 27). But radio drama was an exception. For radio producers reverb was essential, and was often produced by a reverberating “plate” in a drama studio to increase the extension of a sound in time, producing a sense of enlargement without gap or distance that could convey fictional settings.4 Reverb is the account of the interaction of a sound or voice with a place whose acoustic attributes alter its decay, and in radio studios this effect was magically simulated. For longer reverb radio engineers would use “echo chambers,” small enclosures with hard walls, where a voice once spoken was piped in by loudspeaker then picked up again by a second microphone that also drew in reflections of the voice at the same time before being mixed with the original signal for a broadcast. The term “echo chamber” is actually a misnomer, as these spaces were too small to produce a real echo. In the parlance of radio professionals, “echo” describes the return of a sound after long enough of a delay to make it perceivable by a human as a second sonic event; when you hear your voice enlarged by the walls of a church but perceive it as inextricable from your original utterance you hear “reverb,” but when you hear your voice return to you after a delay in a large canyon you hear “echo.” The distinction is, of course, a microsonic version of the question of public space of the Americas itself: contiguity or difference, coextensiveness or gap.

With that in mind, consider the many repetitions, slurs and extended vocal dissolves that McEnaney highlights in Acoustic Properties. There is the repetition by J. Ward Moorehouse in The 49th Parallel, “entering the war was only a question of months” (49), which seems to be echoic rather than reverberant, since the narrative voice makes the statement then it only appears in the character’s mouth afterward. On the other side of the equation we find Boris Max’s stutter in Native Son, something associated with a Steinian inarticulacy, but which also stands as a potent metaphor for the “disequilibrium registered by the fractured dialogue between the stutter and speech” (104). That fracture is also enlarged through reverberation, the amplification of racialized disequilibrium through the “mouthpiece” of the lawyer. Indeed, we can separate many of the moments discussed in Acoustic Properties into rough lists of repetitions that feature contiguous reverberation and others that feature echo-with-a-gap, but more important than such a classification is the fact that the very approach immediately becomes an armature over which political struggle might be arranged. One reason to consider the novel as radio’s apposite other, I am trying to suggest, is its capacity to turn the radiophonic distinction between echo and reverb into an aesthetic framework for political imaginations of the Americas.

Writing for radio also does this. Consider these lines from Archibald MacLeish’s “The Fall of the City,” a play that is also driven by good neighbor ideas (MacLeish based the play on the coming of Hernán Cortés to Tenochtitlán) and New Deal. Here is the culminating moment of the play, when a metallic “conquerer” to whom all the citizens of the city have foolishly thrown down their arms, is unmasked as merely an empty shell. The correspondent on the scene speaks:

There’s no one! . . .

There’s no one at all . . . No one!

The helmet is hollow!

The metal is empty the armor is empty! I tell you

There’s no one at all there: there’s only the metal;

The barrel of metal: the bundle of armor, it’s Empty!

The push of a stiff pole at the nipple would topple it.5

To my knowledge, these lines never aired as written (just imagine network censors blanching at the word “nipple”), but they remain suggestive in their attributes. In a forthcoming publication I make the argument that this passage depicts a voice reverberating as if interacting with the stone of the public square in which the play is set. Note how the repetition of “no one,” “empty,” and “metal” (itself a kind of distorted “helmet”) works like an echo propagating across gaps in an outward wave as the lines of dialogue flow, while sounds at the endings of words (barrel, bundle, nipple, topple) smear together like a reverberation, extending one another into space.

The fact that this passage is both “reverberant” and “echoic” suggests that the verberant modernism I’m drawing out of Acoustic Properties—one founded in real acoustic practices, but actually opened up in the aesthetic space of the realist novel—is not merely able to gather instances of acoustic phenomena, but also suggests kinds of sound that acoustics itself cannot capture, an “otherwise” acoustics. This is perhaps most clear in McEnaney’s reading of the complex voice work of Sarduy’s The Ant Killers: “When we hear an utterance repeated [in the play] with a different tone in a different context, but with a residual timbre that links both characters, we can hear the two contexts dissolve into each other” (163). In taking one context and producing another, it is as if an echo is carrying with it previous acoustic confines, or even conjuring the surfaces that it requires rather than responding to those imposed upon it. And there is a politics to doing so, as McEnaney points out: “Repeated strips of discourse spoken by different voices knit together different imperial and colonial contexts and then disrupt those contexts” (166). In Puig’s turn to tape, discussed at the end of Acoustic Properties, we find a similar move. Through a “pop epic realism” that casts doubt on proprietary notions of voice, McEnaney explains, Puig’s writing “confuses a single story of origins that might link location with locution” using “listening and recording to sculpt a place in his fiction for other voices to resound” (201). Sarduy’s anticolonial aesthetic leads him to approach the politics of verberant modernism as if it were an echo that makes its own chamber, while Puig’s writing follows up with a chamber that solicits the echoes that will inhabit it. In both cases, it is precisely by showing unimagined “other acoustics,” and thereby challenging the way that space “houses” sound, that literature becomes radio’s own most necessary other.