Every year, the Modern Language Association (MLA) asks its various committees and forums to propose new panels for its annual convention. These panels generally allow for committees to collaborate and, in so doing, invite new thinking and research in literary and cultural studies. In early 2019, two MLA committees, the Executive Committee for Chicana/o Literature and the Executive Committee for Sound Studies, collectively sent out a CFP for a conference session titled “Super Sonic Chicanidades.” We invited papers, essays and book presentations that theorized Chicana/o sound, soundtracks, sound-tracking, etc. in music, literature, film and other expressions of popular culture.
The genesis for this call for papers and its theme was influenced by works including Deb Vargas’s Dissonant Divas, Dolores Inés Casillas’s Sounds of Belonging, Michelle Habell-Pallan’s American Sabor, Jennifer Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, Karen Tongson’s Relocations, and Marlen Rios-Hernandez’s essay “If...