Sonic Infrastructures: Mediating National Cinemas in West and South Asia (University of California Press, California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media series, forthcoming November 2026)

Sonic Infrastructures traces how sound shaped cinema and national imagination across Egypt, Iran, and India from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on archival research in these sites, the book follows the commercial ports, shipping lanes, touring circuits, recording industries, and broadcast networks that linked them, showing how voices and music moved through imperial and postcolonial systems of transport, media, and governance. These sonic infrastructures structured the conditions under which sound could be recorded, circulated, authorized, and heard, shaping national cinema imaginaries even as they sustained circuits of exchange that unsettled political boundaries.

Bringing together critical infrastructure studies, sound studies, and feminist film historiography, the book approaches sound as both analytic lens and historical force. By centering the embodied sonic labor of female performers, it demonstrates how voices traveled across uneven media systems and geopolitical formations, actively shaping what national cinema came to sound like. In this account, sonic infrastructures emerge not only as generative cultural formations but also as technologies of national containment and media of solidarity and dissent.