Description
Book SynopsisAlexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to explore the city's sonic cultures and its material and social realities.
Trade Review“Alexandra T. Vazquez’s bold, brilliant, and refreshingly unconventional meditation on sonic placemaking in Florida is fearless and groundbreaking. Compressing the deep, wide, and volatile politics and poetics of the global South into a focused exploration of the “Sunshine State,”
The Florida Room reminds readers of what daring, innovative, and challenging theory looks and sounds like. This luminous book opens up our notions of what counts as theory as well as who gets identified as theorists.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound *
“Not only does
The Florida Room come to us at just the right time in the history of Miami cultures, it arrives from a scholar who is a great interpreter of the interplay between music, performance, and the social. Alexandra T. Vazquez amasses an archive of fascinating materials, listens to them in every sense for what they say about themselves and that which circulates around them, and accounts for that creativity and thought in prose that is virtuosic and open to surprises. This singular book is a true gift.” -- Antonio López, author of * Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America *
"As Vazquez identifies unexpected resonances and collaborations—snaking her way through singer Betty Wright, the Indigenous rock group Tiger Tiger, and Miami bass’s Luke Skyywalker Records—her prose is lively and darting, as if refusing to let a central narrative congeal. It's a loving and rich account of somewhere that exists both in real life and the imagination, too abundant to be contained." -- Cat Zhang * PItchfork, Best Music Books of 2022 *
Table of ContentsPreface. Head for the Beach ix
1. The Florida Room 1
2. Miami from the Spoils 46
3. Drums Take Time 81
4. Bass is the Place 117
Afterword 156
Acknowledgments 159
Notes 165
Bibliography 203
Index 215
