Audible Empire's contributors rethink the mechanisms of empire, showing how musical practice has been important to its spread around the globe. The volume's fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography to put forth music as a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation.

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Hearing Empire—Imperial Listening / Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan  1 Part I. Technologies of Circulation 1. Decolonizing the Ear: The Transcolonial Reverberations of Vernacular Phonograph Music / Michael Denning  25 2. Smoking Hot: Cigarettes, Jazz, and the Production of Global Imaginaries in Interwar Shanghai / Nan Enstad  45 3. Circuit Listening: Grace Chang and the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s / Andrew F. Jones  66 Part II. Audible Displacements 4. The Aesthetics of Allá: Listening Like a Sonidero / Josh Kun  95 5. Sound Legacy: Elsie Houston / Micol Seigel  116 6. Imperial Aurality: Jazz, the Archive, and U.S. Empire / Jairo Moreno  135 7. Where They Came From: Reracializing Music in the Empire of Silence / Philip V. Bohlman  161 Part III. Cultural Policies and Politics in the Sound Market 8. Di Eagle and di Bear: Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Cold War? / Penny Von Eschen  187 9. Currents of Revolutionary Confluence: A View from Cuba's Hip Hop Festival / Marc Perry  209 10. Tango as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Development, Diversity, and the Values of Music in Buenos Aires / Morgan James Luker  225 11. Musical Economies of the Elusive Metropolis / Gavin Steingo  246 Part IV. Anticolonialism 12. The Sound of Anticolonialism / Brent Hayes Edwards  269 13. Rap, Race, Revolution: Post-9/11 Brown and a Hip Hop Critique of Empire / Nitasha Sharma  292 14. Echo and Anthem: Representing Sound, Music, and Difference in Two Colonial Modern Novels / Amanda Weidman  314 15. Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa / Kofi Agawu  334 Discography  357 Bibliography  361 Contributors  391 Index  397

"'Empire,' for most of these authors, is not restrained to political empires. Instead, it entails a broad understanding of declining national sovereignty, modern capitalism, and multinational enterprises, all reflected by and in sound. That gaze alone makes this a dynamic and interesting book for historians to consult."

"Audible Empire is an important, substantive, and significant volume containing essays that display a theoretical sophistication about an important range of musical, social, and political issues. In addressing the ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of public music can illuminate the history of empire and other transnational practices, structures, and institutions, Audible Empire introduces new ways of thinking about music as a social force."