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Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity
by Susan Miyo AsaiA product of twenty-five years of archival and primary research, Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity narrates the efforts of three generations of Japanese Americans to reach “home” through musicking. Using ethnomusicology as a lens, Susan Miyo Asai examines the musical choices of a population that, historically, is considered outside the racial and ethnic boundaries of American citizenship. Emphasizing the notion of national identity and belonging, the volume provokes a discussion about the challenges of nation-building in a democratic society.Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural, and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity, and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States.Sounding Our Way Home contributes to the ongoing struggle for acceptance and equal representation for people of color in the US. A history of Japanese American musicking across three generations, the book unveils the social and political discrimination that nonwhite immigrants and their offspring continue to face when it comes to finding acceptance in US society and culture.
Sounding Out Japan: A Sensory Ethnographic Tour (Sensory Studies)
by Tamara Kohn Richard Chenhall Carolyn S. StevensThis book takes the reader on a sensory ethnographic tour in Japan and describes the many ways sounds seep into everyday experiences. So many ethnographies describe local worlds with a deep attention to what is seen and what people say, but with a limited understanding of the broader sonic environments that enrich and inform everyday life. Through a focus on sounds, both real and imagined, the volume employs a critical ear to engage with a range of sonically enriched encounters, including crosswalk melodies in streetscapes, announcements and jingles at train stations, water features in gardens, dosimeters in nuclear affected zones, sounds of training in music and martial arts halls and celebrations under blossoming cherry trees. The authors use various analytic frames to understand the communicative and symbolic aspects of sounds and to sense the layers of historical meaning, embodied action and affect associated with sonic environments.
Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project)
by Andrew McGraw Christopher J. MillerSounding Out the State of Indonesian Music showcases the breadth and complexity of the music of Indonesia. By bringing together chapters on the merging of Batak musical preferences and popular music aesthetics; the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a Balinese rock band; the burgeoning underground noise scene; the growing interest in kroncong in the United States; and what is included and excluded on Indonesian media, editors Andrew McGraw and Christopher J. Miller expand the scope of Indonesian music studies. Essays analyzing the perception of decline among gamelan musicians in Central Java; changes in performing arts patronage in Bali; how gamelan communities form between Bali and North America; and reflecting on the "refusion" of American mathcore and Balinese gamelan offer new perspectives on more familiar topics.Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music calls for a new paradigm in popular music studies, grapples with the imperative to decolonialize, and recognizes the field's grounding in diverse forms of practice.
Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros And Lesbian Musicality
by Martha MockusSounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality examines the musical career of the avant-garde composer, accordionist, whose radical innovations of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have redefined the aesthetic and formal parameters of American experimental music. While other scholars have studied Oliveros as a disciple of John Cage and a contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley, Sounding Out resituates Pauline Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists and musicians. This book shows how the women in Oliveros’s life were central sources of creative energy and exchange during a crucial moment in feminist and queer cultural history. Crafting a dynamic relationship between feminism and music-making, this book offers a queerly original analysis of Oliveros’s work as a musical form of feminist activism and argues for the productive role of experimental music in lesbian feminist theory. Sounding Out combines key elements of feminist theories of lesbian sexuality with Oliveros’s major compositions, performances, critical essays, and interviews. It also includes previously unpublished correspondence between Oliveros and Edith Guttierez, Jill Johnston, Annea Lockwood, Kate Millett, and Jane Rule.
Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow
by Brian D. Mcinnes Waubgeshig RiceFrancis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), a member of the Ojibwe nation, was born in Shawanaga, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he became the most decorated Canadian Indigenous soldier for bravery and the most accomplished sniper in North American military history. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing, Ontario. He served his community as both chief and councillor and belonged to the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, an early national Indigenous political organization. Francis proudly served a term as Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government, retiring from office in 1950. Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historic insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay. In "Sounding Thunder", Brian McInnes provides new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.
Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape
by Prof. Jim Sykes Prof. Julia Suzanne BylA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be "heard" outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.
Sounding the Limits of Life
by Stefan Helmreich Michele Friedner Sophia RoosthWhat is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists--biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers--are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual.Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"--as investigating, fathoming, listening--to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis.Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.
Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema
by Jean MaFrom the beginning of the sound cinema era, singing actresses captivated Chinese audiences. In Sounding the Modern Woman, Jean Ma shows how their rise to stardom attests to the changing roles of women in urban modernity and the complex symbiosis between the film and music industries. The songstress--whether appearing as an opera actress, showgirl, revolutionary, or country lass--belongs to the lineage of the Chinese modern woman, and her forty year prevalence points to a distinctive gendering of lyrical expression in Chinese film. Ma guides readers through film history by way of the on and off-screen careers of many of the most compelling performers in Chinese film history, such as Zhou Xuan and Grace Chang, revealing the ways that national crises and Cold War conflict shaped their celebrity. As a bridge between the film cultures of prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong, the songstress brings into view a dense web of connections linking these two periods and places that cut across the divides of war, national politics, and geography.
Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata
by Roy StarrsThis first full length, and long overdue, study of Kawabata, Japans first Nobel laureate for literature and the most widely known for his novels Snow Country (1960) and Sound of the Mountain (1970).
Soundpainting: Collaborative Creativity in Conducted Improvisation (Palgrave Studies in Sound)
by Anders EskildsenThis book explores Soundpainting, a multidisciplinary sign language for live composition and conducted improvisation, highlighting its role in facilitating creative, social interactions in music and other performative arts. Examining the meaning of Soundpainting’s syntax, the connection between constraints and creativity in hand signs, and the means for dynamic distribution and transformation of agency within ensembles, the book provides insight into the nature of cocreation and the organization of creative processes.
Sounds
by John MowittThis is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we "audit" sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "sound studies." To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound--including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence--to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.
Sounds & Furies: The Love-Hate Relationship between Women and Slang
by Jonathon Green'When it comes to distaff dirtiness, mainstream males such as Dickens and Dekker make easy pickings, but Green finds the greatest treasures when he mudlarks on the margins. In Sounds & Furies, he has dredged up some gems.'Emma Byrne, Spectator'From fishwives to flappers and from music hall performers to Mumsnetters, women have indeed made contributions to the slang vocabulary of English; by bringing together so much fascinating material about their words and their worlds, this book makes its own contribution to the history of both women and language.'Professor Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication, Worcester College, University of Oxford'Green comprehensively disproves that slang is inherently masculine. Mumsnetters and bulldaggers, flappers and slappers, shicksters and hash-slingers all put in their claims as slang-users in their own right in this entertaining and thought-provoking book. Any writer venturing into the contentious area of women as users, creators or objects of slang from now on will look to Green for guidance or for arguments.'Julie Coleman, author of The Life of SlangSlang. The ultimate in man-made languages. The male gaze made verbal. A world where words for intercourse mean 'man hits woman', the penis is a gun, a knife or club and the vagina a terrifying tunnel. Possibly with teeth. Two thousand words for woman and every one a put-down. Even 'mother' is simply short for the grossest of obscenities.Thus the story, now and for several hundred years. But stories are just that and perhaps there's an alternative.In this book Jonathon Green, the leading collector of English-language slang and drawing on forty years of research in the field, asks whether women have another role to play. As slang's active, positive, rebellious subject, rather than its endlessly derided, submissive object.Sounds & Furies represents a quest to overturn a long-established, but far from invulnerable belief system. To show that throughout a recorded history that starts with Chaucer's bawdy, mouthy and magnificently self-willed Wife of Bath and carries on through a cast of working girls and villainesses, playwrights and bestselling authors, shop-girls and fish-wives and through to the modern, on-line worlds of Mumsnet and Tinder, women have always made slang their own.If slang has always been the language of the margins, then women, for all their numbers, have also been consigned to the margins. Those days, it is ever more clear, are over. If slang has a role then it is to represent us at our most human. That may not mean 'admirable' but it surely means 'true'. And humanity is on offer to everyone, whatever gender they may claim. That goes for language, whatever its variety, too.From the foreword by sex historian Kate Lister:'Patriarchal cultures have understood women, controlled women, and marginalised women. But, this book also reveals that it is the rebellious women who used slang: the fishwives, the scolds, the whores, and the harridans. Long may they continue to do so.'
Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else
by Sarah Costello Kayla Kaszyca'Somehow, over time, we forgot that the rituals behind dating and sex were constructs made up by human beings and eventually, they became hard and fast rules that society imposed on us all.'True Love. Third Wheels. Dick pics. 'Dying alone'. Who decided this was normal?Sarah and Kayla invite you to put on your purple aspec glasses - and rethink everything you thought you knew about society, friendship, sex, romance and more.Drawing on their personal stories, and those of aspec friends all over the world, prepare to explore your microlabels, investigate different models of partnership, delve into the intersection of gender norms and compulsory sexuality and reconsider the meaning of sex - when allosexual attraction is out of the equation.Spanning the whole range of relationships we have in our lives - to family, friends, lovers, society, our gender, and ourselves, this book asks you to let your imagination roam, and think again what human connection really is. Includes exclusive 'Sounds Fake But Okay' podcast episodes.
Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else
by Sarah Costello Kayla Kaszyca'Somehow, over time, we forgot that the rituals behind dating and sex were constructs made up by human beings and eventually, they became hard and fast rules that society imposed on us all.'An empowering guide to help aspec people become more confident in their identities and understand their relationships, written by the hosts of the #1 podcast on asexuality.True Love. Third Wheels. Dick pics. 'Dying alone'. Who decided this was normal?Sarah and Kayla invite you to put on your purple aspec glasses - and rethink everything you thought you knew about society, friendship, sex, romance and more.Drawing on their personal stories, and those of aspec friends all over the world, prepare to explore your microlabels, investigate different models of partnership, delve into the intersection of gender norms and compulsory sexuality and reconsider the meaning of sex - when allosexual attraction is out of the equation.Spanning the whole range of relationships we have in our lives - to family, friends, lovers, society, our gender, and ourselves, this book asks you to let your imagination roam, and think again what human connection really is. Includes exclusive 'Sounds Fake But Okay' podcast episodes.(P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Sounds German: Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational
by Kirkland A. FulkFor decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.
Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South
by Mary Herring WrightMary Herring Wright's memoir adds an important dimension to the current literature in that it is a story by and about an African American deaf child. The author recounts her experiences growing up as a deaf person in Iron Mine, North Carolina, from the 1920s through the 1940s. Her story is unique and historically significant because it provides valuable descriptive information about the faculty and staff of the North Carolina school for Black deaf and blind students from the perspective of a student as well as a student teacher. In addition, this engrossing narrative contains details about the curriculum, which included a week-long Black History celebration where students learned about important Blacks such as Madame Walker, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and George Washington Carver. It also describes the physical facilities as well as the changes in those facilities over the years. In addition, Sounds Like Home occurs over a period of time that covers two major events in American history, the Depression and World War II. Wright's account is one of enduring faith, perseverance, and optimism. Her keen observations will serve as a source of inspiration for others who are challenged in their own ways by life's obstacles.
Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
by Jessica Chiccehitto HindmanA young woman leaves Appalachia for life as a classical musician—or so she thinks. When aspiring violinist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman lands a job with a professional ensemble in New York City, she imagines she has achieved her lifelong dream. But the ensemble proves to be a sham. When the group “performs,” the microphones are never on. Instead, the music blares from a CD. The mastermind behind this scheme is a peculiar and mysterious figure known as The Composer, who is gaslighting his audiences with music that sounds suspiciously like the Titanic movie soundtrack. On tour with his chaotic ensemble, Hindman spirals into crises of identity and disillusionment as she “plays” for audiences genuinely moved by the performance, unable to differentiate real from fake. Sounds Like Titanic is a surreal, often hilarious coming-of-age story. Hindman writes with precise, candid prose and sharp insight into ambition and gender, especially when it comes to the difficulties young women face in a world that views them as silly, shallow, and stupid. As the story swells to a crescendo, it gives voice to the anxieties and illusions of a generation of women, and reveals the failed promises of a nation that takes comfort in false realities.
Sounds So Good to Me
by Barry Lee PearsonThe roots of much American music lie in the intensely personal art form of the blues. What bluesmen from W.C. Handy to B.B. King have told us about their lives has shaped America's perception of the blues. These life stories provide central insights into blues music and stand as a fascinating form of narrative in their own right.Barry Lee Pearson has conducted dozens of field interviews and collected over a hundred published autobiographies to present this collective portrait of bluesmen's careers as they themselves tell them: their musical learning, communities, work, pleasures, travels, triumphs, and crises.
Sounds of Change
by Michael C. Keith Christopher H. SterlingWhen it first appeared in the 1930s, FM radio was a technological marvel, providing better sound and nearly eliminating the static that plagued AM stations. It took another forty years, however, for FM's popularity to surpass that of AM. In Sounds of Change, Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith detail the history of FM, from its inception to its dominance (for now, at least) of the airwaves.Initially, FM's identity as a separate service was stifled, since most FM outlets were AM-owned and simply simulcast AM programming and advertising. A wartime hiatus followed by the rise of television precipitated the failure of hundreds of FM stations. As Sterling and Keith explain, the 1960s brought FCC regulations allowing stereo transmission and requiring FM programs to differ from those broadcast on co-owned AM stations. Forced nonduplication led some FM stations to branch out into experimental programming, which attracted the counterculture movement, minority groups, and noncommercial public and college radio. By 1979, mainstream commercial FM was finally reaching larger audiences than AM. The story of FM since 1980, the authors say, is the story of radio, especially in its many musical formats. But trouble looms. Sterling and Keith conclude by looking ahead to the age of digital radio--which includes satellite and internet stations as well as terrestrial stations--suggesting that FM's decline will be partly a result of self-inflicted wounds--bland programming, excessive advertising, and little variety.When it first appeared in the 1930s, FM radio was a technological marvel, providing better sound and nearly eliminating the static that plagued AM stations. It took another forty years, however, for FM's popularity to surpass that of AM. In Sounds of Change, Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith detail the history of FM, from its inception to its dominance (for now, at least) of the airwaves.Initially, FM's identity as a separate service was stifled, since most FM outlets were AM-owned and simply simulcast AM programming and advertising. But the 1960s brought FCC regulations allowing stereo transmission and requiring FM programs to differ from those broadcast on co-owned AM stations. Branching out into experimental programming, FM soon attracted the counterculture movement, minority groups, and noncommercial public and college radio. By 1979, mainstream commercial FM was finally reaching larger audiences than AM. Recent decades have been FM's heyday. But trouble looms. Sterling and Keith conclude by looking ahead to the age of digital radio--which includes satellite and internet stations as well as terrestrial stations--suggesting that FM's eventual decline will be partly a result of self-inflicted wounds--bland programming, excessive advertising, and little variety.-->
Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño
by Alex E. ChávezIn Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.
Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850 - 1914 (Studies in Immigration and Culture #3)
by Barbara LorenzkowskiSounds of Ethnicity takes us into the linguistic, cultural, and geographical borderlands of German North America in the Great Lakes region between 1850 and 1914. Drawing connections between immigrant groups in Buffalo, New York, and Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Barbara Lorenzkowski examines the interactions of language and music—specifically German-language education, choral groups, and music festivals—and their roles in creating both an ethnic sense of self and opportunities for cultural exchanges at the local, ethnic, and transnational levels. She exposes the tensions between the self-declared ethnic leadership that extolled the virtues of the German mother tongue as preserver of ethnic identity and gateway to scholarship and high culture, and the hybrid realities of German North America where the lives of migrants were shaped by two languages, English and German. Theirs was a song not of cultural purity, but of cultural fusion that gave meaning to the way German migrants made a home for themselves in North America.Written in lively and elegant prose, Sounds of Ethnicity is a new and exciting approach to the history of immigration and identity in North America.
Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe
by Daniel MoratLong ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.
Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust
by J. Mackenzie PierceSounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism
by Timothy Rommen Jocelyne GuilbaultThe contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encounters of musical production. In so doing, they prompt a rethinking of how to account for music and sound's resonances in postcolonial spaces. Contributors. Jerome Camal, Steven Feld, Francio Guadeloupe, Jocelyne Guilbault, Jordi Halfman, Susan Harewood, Percy C. Hintzen, Timothy Rommen
Sounds of the Citizens: Dancehall and Community in Jamaica
by Anne GalvinDancehall: It's simultaneously a source of raucous energy in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica; a way of life for a group of professional artists and music professionals; and a force of stability and tension within the community. Electronically influenced, relevant to urban Jamaicans, and highly danceable, dancehall music and culture forms a core of popular entertainment in the nation. As Anne Galvin reveals in Sounds of the Citizens, the rhythms of dancehall music reverberate in complicated ways throughout the lives of countless Jamaicans. Galvin highlights the unique alliance between the dancehall industry and community development efforts. As the central role of the state in supporting communities has diminished, the rise of private efforts such as dancehall becomes all the more crucial. The tension, however, between those involved in the industry and those within the neighborhoods is palpable and often dangerous. Amidst all this, individual Jamaicans interact with the dancehall industry and its culture to find their own paths of employment, social identity, and sexual mores. As Sounds of the Citizens illustrates, the world of entertainment in Jamaica is serious business and uniquely positioned as a powerful force within the community.