Sonic Infrastructures

My first book, Sonic Infrastructures: National Cinema Imaginaries and Soundscapes of West and South Asia (under advance contract with the California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media series at UC Press), traces the resonant and interconnected histories of cinema and sound technologies across Cairo, Tehran, Bombay, Istanbul, and beyond. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the book explores how European imperialism intersected with older regional networks of exchange—routes that had long carried tales such as 1001 Nights and Layla and Majnun—to create new dynamics of contact and circulation.

I argue that the infrastructures of empire—canals, trains, shipping routes—were also sonic infrastructures, carrying the voices of stars across records, radio, and cinema. These networks made possible both the crossing of national boundaries and the reassertion of them. Through the sounds of embodied female voices, the book makes audible the struggles over what the ‘national’ meant—and how it was heard—in a rapidly changing twentieth-century media landscape.