Another excellent Duke University Press title that has been indexed by Southwest Humanities is Tana Gentic’s Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona, which was published on 19 September, 2025. In Geographies of the Ear, Gentic offers a perceptive study of how sound shapes the fabric of post-Franco Barcelona. She introduces the concept of “echoic memory” to trace how the city’s auditory traces, from migrant and tourist accents to punk, drag performances, free-form radio, and anti-gentrification protests, carry the weight of colonial, political, and cultural histories moving from neighborhood to nation and beyond. Through an array of cultural artifacts—fanzines, comic books, literature, documentary films, TV, media, everyday conversations—Gentic listens to how underground and marginalized aural practices contest the city’s dominant, monolingual narratives. By doing so, she challenges easy geographic or national boundaries and reimagines how identity and modernity resonate across sonic terrain. Geographies of the Ear reconfigures our sense of place by tuning into the layered, persistent sonic life of the city—illuminating how echoes of the past and the voices of resistance redefine urban soundscapes. It is a vital contribution to the fields of music and sound studies, cultural studies, European studies, and Postcolonial and Colonial studies and will be of interest anyone interested in how listening and sonic politics shape modern cities and cultural memory. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 