To save as a PDF, click "Print" and select "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" from the Destination dropdown. On a mobile device, click the "Share" button, then choose "Print" and "Save as PDF".
Loading
To save as a PDF, click "Print" and select "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" from the Destination dropdown. On a mobile device, click the "Share" button, then choose "Print" and "Save as PDF".
A 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.
Sonic Infrastructures traces how sound shaped the transregional movement of cinema across the Middle East and South Asia from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on archival research in Egypt, India, and Iran, Claire Cooley shows how sonic infrastructures—including gramophone records, radio, early sound cinema, and film festivals—enabled sound to circulate across regions while also regulating how it was heard. These infrastructures informed national cinema imaginaries even as they sustained circuits of exchange that unsettled political boundaries. Foregrounding sound as both historical object and method, the book centers the gendered labor of female performers whose embodied voices moved across colonial and postcolonial worlds. Bringing feminist film history into conversation with sound studies and critical infrastructure studies, Sonic Infrastructures reveals how sound functioned at once as a technology of national containment and a medium of solidarity and dissent.
"This ambitious, thoroughly researched, and elegantly written book offers a compelling sonic media history of the emergence of cinema in the Middle East and South Asia. Attending in equal measure to the physicality of media, the circulatory character of media industries, feminist practice in historiography, and an ethics of listening, Claire Cooley offers a truly field-shifting perspective that will be welcomed by scholars of film, media, and sound studies."—Kaveh Askari, author of Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit
“Meticulous research propels Cooley’s riveting account of transregional sonic circuits that link West and South Asia. This book not only enriches histories of film distribution and sound through its treasure trove of details but also stretches our methodological and analytical imaginations. It attunes us to shared histories of cinema while highlighting uneven industrial, technological, and sociopolitical terrains that shape listening and audibility. This work will ignite conversations on South-South media historiographies, gendered industrial labor, and sonic stardom.”—Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
"Sonic Infrastructures embarks on exhilarating journeys between Egypt, India, and many places in between. Eclectically archival and theoretically assured, Cooley’s book honors long-standing South–South cultural interconnections often overlooked by dominant, nationally focused studies. Rarely do academic books ring out with such curiosity, integrity, and narrative flair."—Kay Dickinson, author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers