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Sonic Infrastructures

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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 ...
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  • 10 November 2026
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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 shaped 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.

 
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Price: $12.99
Pages: 255
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media
Publication Date: 10 November 2026
ISBN: 9780520402751
Format: eBook
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Contents

List of Illustrations and Media

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Sonic Infrastructures    

1          Technologies of Inscription and Circuits of Sonic Stardom    

2          Sonic Labor and the Trouble of Transition      

3          Broadcast and Its Discontents 

4          Resonant Friction and Postwar (Non-)Alignments     

5          Soundscapes of "National" Cinema Industries           

Conclusion: Sounding Region Otherwise        

Notes  

Selected Bibliography

Index