The ways Amazonian Kichwa (Quichua) women produce, circulate, and engage with other women’s songs demonstrates that both music and radio media are significant methods for linguistic and cultural activism in the province of Napo, Ecuador. Indigenous engagements with aural mediation and media, particularly those of Indigenous women, allow for new insights within both studies of media and cultural revitalization. Media technologies alone may not be enough to return a language to daily use, but they are an important support for language activism and site of soundwork for Indigenous peoples. Focused on the convergence of new radio forms and screen-based technologies, speech has been taken as the primary dimension of soundwork, with noise and music as secondary aspects. Kichwa radio media reveals that music can also comprise a primary dimension of soundwork, which produces affective and interpersonal experiences for listeners through aural engagements that encourage the vitality of shifting languages.
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Winter 2020
Research Article|
December 01 2020
Affective Technologies: Kichwa Women’s Media Activism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Georgia C. Ennis
Georgia C. Ennis
Junior Visiting Fellow, Center for Humanities and Information, Penn State University
Georgia Ennis is a postdoctoral scholar at the Penn State Center for Humanities & Information, where she is developing a book manuscript and companion digital archive. Her book-in-progress explores the role of community media in grassroots linguistic, cultural, and ecological revitalization in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
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Resonance (2020) 1 (4): 376–393.
Citation
Georgia C. Ennis; Affective Technologies: Kichwa Women’s Media Activism in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Resonance 1 December 2020; 1 (4): 376–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.4.376
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