Alejandra Bronfman
Biographic Data
| ID | 105771 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alejandra Bronfman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alejandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Bronfman |
| SIGNATURE | BRONFMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4118-6329 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Subject of Revolution
Portable Postsocialisms
Remediate, Listen, Repeat
Drawing attention to recently digitized archives from across the Caribbean, this chapter frames the study of radio as an exploration of race, aurality, and the politics of the archive. The translation of radio from past to present, from ephemeral to permanent, and from the site of twentieth-century production to sites of twenty-first-century archiving and transnational consumption raise important theoretical and methodological questions. Here are…
“How much noise can a human being stand?”
This article places noise and sound at the center of an inquiry into the environmental impact of military occupations. Drawing from the example of the US occupation of Culebra, Puerto Rico (1902–75), I argue that conflicts over the impact of noise index epistemological uncertainties about the status of sound as a scientific object of study. Reading the records of the Electro-Acoustic and Psycho-Acoustic Laboratories at Harvard University in the 1…
Travels with Albizu Campos's Voice
After the Cuban intellectual Juan Marinello met Afro-Puerto Rican Nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos in 1927, he wrote that Albizu's voice was “like a cry that emerged far from the body in which it was born” (“como un clamor que arrancara de más allá del cuerpo en que nacía”). Marinello may or may not have been thinking of the then-new technologies of radio broadcasting or gramophones. He may or may not have been thinking of scenes of spiritual poss…
De la plantación al resort
Circulating Culture
Cubans and their stuff are often in motion. As the book's premise this both makes intuitive sense and points to surprising circuits of trade and exchange. The author traces the circulation of, among other things, human remains, antiques, valuables pawned and borrowed, and digital objects. Through a series of ethnographic episodes drawn from the author's fieldwork in Havana and Miami, Cubans on either side of the Florida Strait who mobilize person…
Introducing the Special Series
How do sound, militarism, and ecologies relate to each other? Mindful of Jim Sykes’s criticism of a tendency in sound studies scholarship to attend to the most spectacular aspects of “wartime sound and listening,” we are particularly invested in contributions decentering “war” or, rather, showing how it is already dispersed through militarized ecologies. We seek to remain mindful of the profoundly uneven asymmetries that mark the workings, experi…
Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba
This volume of essays, planned in the aftermath of historian Alistair Hennessy's death, is intended to pay homage to his work.As Antoni Kapcia's brief preface points out, Hennessy's research covered a wide range of subjects even as it demonstrated a depth of analysis.Moreover, he encouraged scholars to take interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to their historical inquiries.The essays address topics in Cuban history including aboliti…
The Things of Others
Melville and Frances Herskovits, Arthur Ramos, Nina Rodrigues, Fernando Ortiz, Rómulo Lachatañeré, Ruth Landes, E. Franklin Frazier: these are but a few of the many researchers who in the middle of the twentieth century collectively authored an object of study now known as Afro-Latin America. They wrote classic anthropological texts, recounting details of cultural practice, rituals, histories, spirits, and sacred spaces and objects. We also under…
Phonographic Memories
How does one read musical novels?Njelle Hamilton proposes that novels in which music and recording technologies figure prominently offer an opportunity to consider a variety of themes, including memory, nostalgia, belonging
Madhouse
J. Justin Castro. Radio in Revolution
In its claims for the centrality of wireless communications to politics and diplomacy, Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897–1938, contributes fresh material to the history of the Mexican Revolution. A fascinating addition to a recent spate of radio histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, this Mexican case study includes many characters familiar to anyone who has studied Mexico’s early twentieth century. M…
Broadcasting Modernity
Sonic colour zones
At the intersection of sound studies and the history of ethnomusicology, this article explores the production of sonic colour zones through Laura Boulton’s recordings in Africa and the Caribbean in the 1920s and 30s. Her own accounts, correspondence, field notes and recordings offer an opportunity to attend to alternative understandings of the relationship between humans and animals, and to situate recording practices within the field of natural …
Isles of Noise
Fugitive Sounds
This short essay is a response to Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013). It aims to recreate the experience of reading the book and the transformation in listening that the book prompted. Written in both personal and academic registers, the essay begins with the author's analytic and affective responses to the book, before posing some questions it raises. Specifically, it asks for further exploration…
Forum Introduction
Biography of a Sonic Archive
My current research interrogates the sound recording as an early twentieth-century artifact crucial to the production of knowledge. Taking up anthropologist Steven Feld's observation that sound recording is “a technology of creative and analytic mediation, which requires craft and editing and articulation just like writing,” I argue that the sound recording ought to be understood as a technology that generates rather than reflects knowledge.1 As …
Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920, written by Tiffany A. Sippial
Aurality
The discovery of a sonorous written archive prompted Ana María Ochoa Gautier to write this book, which proposes to rethink nineteenth-century histories of personhood, nation building, and the constitution of the relationship between nature and culture. The voice — as “ambiguously located between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (p. 3), in Ochoa's terms, or both of the body and easily imagined as separate from it, as other scholars have pointed out — is ke…
Birth of a Station
What accounts for the peculiar history of Jamaican broadcasting? This essay considers Kingston as a sonic terrain and examines the ways both colonial officials and residents of the islands engaged in a process of understanding Kingston's place within an emerging electroacoustic soundscape with points in New York, Havana, Port-au-Prince, and London. The author relies on an implicitly comparative framework but is also interested in following people…
Grupo Antillano
In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the politica…
Culture of Class
"Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946 by Matthew B. Karush." Canadian Journal of History, 48(2), pp. 378–379
On Swelling
En Plena Libertad y Democracia
On 14 November 1904, El Mundo, Havana's conservative newspaper, reported the "mysterious disappearance of Zoila," a four-year-old white girl, from her home in El Gabriel, a small town outside of Havana.1 Over the course of a year, the newspaper would devote a great deal of attention to the story. Eduardo Varela Zequiera, the story's reporter who would eventually build a career based on his reporting on issues of race, publicly surmised, along wit…
The Allure of Technology
Sonic colour zones
At the intersection of sound studies and the history of ethnomusicology, this article explores the production of sonic colour zones through Laura Boulton’s recordings in Africa and the Caribbean in the 1920s and 30s. Her own accounts, correspondence, field notes and recordings offer an opportunity to attend to alternative understandings of the relationship between humans and animals, and to situate recording practices within the field of natural …
Forum Introduction
Biography of a Sonic Archive
My current research interrogates the sound recording as an early twentieth-century artifact crucial to the production of knowledge. Taking up anthropologist Steven Feld's observation that sound recording is “a technology of creative and analytic mediation, which requires craft and editing and articulation just like writing,” I argue that the sound recording ought to be understood as a technology that generates rather than reflects knowledge.1 As …
Birth of a Station
What accounts for the peculiar history of Jamaican broadcasting? This essay considers Kingston as a sonic terrain and examines the ways both colonial officials and residents of the islands engaged in a process of understanding Kingston's place within an emerging electroacoustic soundscape with points in New York, Havana, Port-au-Prince, and London. The author relies on an implicitly comparative framework but is also interested in following people…
Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898
Emerging from an exhaustive if not exhausting meditation on the causes, contingencies and conjunctures of 1898, Cuban historiography is now turning to relatively unexamined issues in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joan Casanovas’s Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898, opens an important new area of research as it delves into the formation of an urban working class, comprised mostly of tobacco wor…
En Plena Libertad y Democracia
On 14 November 1904, El Mundo, Havana's conservative newspaper, reported the "mysterious disappearance of Zoila," a four-year-old white girl, from her home in El Gabriel, a small town outside of Havana.1 Over the course of a year, the newspaper would devote a great deal of attention to the story. Eduardo Varela Zequiera, the story's reporter who would eventually build a career based on his reporting on issues of race, publicly surmised, along wit…
Wizards and Scientists
In this provocative, challenging book, all that is solid indeed melts into air. Through intense scrutiny and erudite analysis, Palmié proposes to unravel the dichotomies and concepts upon which much Caribbean historiography rests. Binaries such as superstition vs. rationality or primitive rebel vs. organic intellectual (both of which fall under the broader opposition of Afro-Cuban tradition vs. Western modernity), he argues, obfuscate more than t…
Measures of Equality
Undoing Empire
The author’s strategy is to read a series of texts for what they might reveal about mulatez in the Caribbean. The texts include canonical writings such as Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias, C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Washington Irving’s A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada and A History of the Life and Travels of Christopher Columbus, as well as a number of paintings, sculptures, and buildings. By mulatez he does not mean to…
On the Move
The Caribbean stands out in the popular imagination as a 'place without history', a place which has somehow eluded modernity. Haiti is envisioned as being trapped in an endless cycle of violence and instability, Cuba as a 1950s time warp, Jamaicans as ganja-smoking Rastafarians, while numerous pristine, anonymous islands are simply peaceful idylls. The notion of 'getting away from it all' lures countless visitors, offering the possibility of tota…
Jorge Ibarra - Prologue to Revolution
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
The Allure of Technology
Measures of Equality
Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures
Understanding the Caribbean, according to the editors of this collection of essays, entails pursuing the “elusive ideal of a region meant by its geography to be apprehended as a totality even though it is fractured by history and dispersed by language and discourse” (p. 3). In their eloquent introduction, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo take up Antonio Benítez Rojo’s injunction to acknowledge the dualities attendant on studie…
Tales full of sound, signifying something
Historia de Cuba. Historia de las Antillas
This ambitious volume is the first in a sweeping series devoted to the history of the Caribbean. Subsequent volumes promise to take on the histories of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the non-Hispanic Caribbean, and finally, a comparative study of the region. Organized thematically and comprised of chapters by a variety of Cuba scholars, it offers both an encyclopedic rehearsal of significant events and a series of analytical perspectives on…
On Swelling
Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean
Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gend…
The Fantastic Flying Donkey and the Tattoo
This essay will use the documentation surrounding the objects displayed in Cuba's Museum of Legal Medicine (among them, an "aero buey fantastico" made out of bread crumbs by inmates at Havana's Hospital for the Demented) to examine the logics that bound ethnography, medicine, policing, and collecting to one another in the early decades of the twentieth century. In a 1930 pamphlet describing this collection, the authors suggest that the museum wil…
Culture of Class
"Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946 by Matthew B. Karush." Canadian Journal of History, 48(2), pp. 378–379
Birth of a Station
What accounts for the peculiar history of Jamaican broadcasting? This essay considers Kingston as a sonic terrain and examines the ways both colonial officials and residents of the islands engaged in a process of understanding Kingston's place within an emerging electroacoustic soundscape with points in New York, Havana, Port-au-Prince, and London. The author relies on an implicitly comparative framework but is also interested in following people…
Grupo Antillano
In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the politica…
Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840–1920, written by Tiffany A. Sippial
Aurality
The discovery of a sonorous written archive prompted Ana María Ochoa Gautier to write this book, which proposes to rethink nineteenth-century histories of personhood, nation building, and the constitution of the relationship between nature and culture. The voice — as “ambiguously located between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (p. 3), in Ochoa's terms, or both of the body and easily imagined as separate from it, as other scholars have pointed out — is ke…
Isles of Noise
Fugitive Sounds
This short essay is a response to Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013). It aims to recreate the experience of reading the book and the transformation in listening that the book prompted. Written in both personal and academic registers, the essay begins with the author's analytic and affective responses to the book, before posing some questions it raises. Specifically, it asks for further exploration…
Forum Introduction
Biography of a Sonic Archive
My current research interrogates the sound recording as an early twentieth-century artifact crucial to the production of knowledge. Taking up anthropologist Steven Feld's observation that sound recording is “a technology of creative and analytic mediation, which requires craft and editing and articulation just like writing,” I argue that the sound recording ought to be understood as a technology that generates rather than reflects knowledge.1 As …
J. Justin Castro. Radio in Revolution
In its claims for the centrality of wireless communications to politics and diplomacy, Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897–1938, contributes fresh material to the history of the Mexican Revolution. A fascinating addition to a recent spate of radio histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, this Mexican case study includes many characters familiar to anyone who has studied Mexico’s early twentieth century. M…
History (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Cuban History and Society (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Anthropology (7 works)