Sonic Infrastructures: Mediating National Cinemas in West and South Asia

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Sonic Infrastructures traces how sound shaped the transregional movement of cinema across the Middle East and South Asia from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on archival research in Egypt, India, and Iran, Claire Cooley shows how sonic infrastructures—including gramophone records, radio, early sound cinema, and film festivals—enabled sound to circulate across regions while also regulating how it was heard. These infrastructures shaped national cinema imaginaries even as they sustained circuits of exchange that unsettled political boundaries. Foregrounding sound as both historical object and method, the book centers the gendered labor of female performers whose embodied voices moved across colonial and postcolonial worlds. Bringing feminist film history into conversation with sound studies and critical infrastructure studies, Sonic Infrastructures reveals how sound functioned at once as a technology of national containment and a medium of solidarity and dissent.