Through close readings of documentary film soundscapes, the essays in Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South provide new perspectives on the sonic dimension of nonfiction film outside the European-American mainstream.

Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

Introduction: Being Heard: Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South

Christopher L. Ballengee

Chapter 1. Helping a Nation to Know Itself: Postcolonial Identity and Sonic Horizons at Films Division India, 1950–1975

Rounak Maiti

Chapter 2. Invisible Architecture, Radical Ethnography: Juan Downey and the Sound of Laughter

Michael Newell Witte

Chapter 3. Drum Making as a Way of Life in South-Central Uganda: A Filmic Approach

Damascus Kafumbe

Chapter 4. Narrating a Revolutionary Life through Song: Personal, Political, and Musical Choices in Making Singing a Great Dream

Anna Stirr and Bhakta Syangtan

Chapter 5. Beyond the Visual: The Use of Sound in Tales from Our Childhood

Rajesh James and Malavika Pillai

Chapter 6. Lodes of Metal: The Texture and Sound of Memory in Latin American Heavy Metal Documentaries

Daniel Nevárez Araújo and Nelson Varas-Díaz

Chapter 7. Framing the Future: The Take, Nine Queens, and Argentina’s Neoliberal Soundscapes

Yovanna Pineda and Lucas Izquierdo

Chapter 8. Under the Amazon Sun: Musical Composition, Filmic Form, and Encounters of History and the Everyday in Antonio Wong Rengifo’s Chronotopias of the Peruvian Amazon

Aleksander Sedzielarz

Chapter 9. Aural Identities: Auditive Representations of Ethnicity in Documentary Film

Miki Brunou

Chapter 10. Only Connect: Two Trinidads, Two Documentaries

Andre Bagoo

About the Contributors