The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s recently-released album Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands—as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing (Duke 2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores, and features luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, poetry, and jazz. Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, this multi-modal scholarly work uniquely integrates an epic spectrum of regional Mexican and Latin American sonic elements with field recordings and ethnographic songwriting drawn from years of research across the U.S.-Mexico border and his own personal experiences of personal loss. In his talk, The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands, Chávez addresses how this work crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, refiguring the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement to strategically reimagine the possibilities and forms scholarship can take.