In her first book Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, Alexandra T. Vazquez proposed a mode of listening that accounts for unbounded musical ephemera and the things left behind—sonic excesses missed and forgotten that linger outside the borders delimiting discrete musical performance. For Vazquez, these details reveal traces of “the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present” (2013, 4). As something of a methodological extension to Listening in Detail, Vazquez’s second monograph listens for the silenced details of Florida’s fraught history as they find expression in music. To hear these details, she argues, is to hear stories that extend Florida well beyond its physical borders—stories that resist and outright refuse state-sanctioned narratives that have concealed decades of land extraction and violence with a veneer of luxury real estate development and the exoticized hedonism adorning visions of Miami’s fabled nightlife.
Vazquez also introduces a new analytic stated plainly...
University of California Press