Sonic Modernity and Decolonizing Countersounds in the Poetry of Urayoán Noel

Abstract

Urayoán Noel’s poetry has garnered much attention for its promotion of hemispheric politics and poetics, along with its interrogation of technology’s structural and narrative interventions into diasporic cultures. This article investigates the role of sound in the Puerto Rican poet’s articulation of contemporary struggles against overwhelming hypertechnology. The analysis focuses on three poems: “Lino: Employee of the Month,” from Kool Logic/La lógica kool (2005); “babel o city (el gran concurso),” from Hi-density Politics (2010); and the live-recorded version of “Boringkén,” from Boringkén (2008). Drawing on Aldama’s (2013) concept of poetic estrangement and Dowdy’s (2013) analysis of Latinx poetic critiques of neoliberalism, this article examines how exclusionary soundscapes are built through repressive understandings of sonic modernity, and how countersounds attempt to decolonize those spaces. Noel’s poetry shows how creative voices and the reappropriation of sound technologies can help position the diasporic subject and subvert dominant sonic structures.