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Acoustic Properties The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on page 314. Acoustic Properties Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas Tom McEnaney ❘ , this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: McEnaney, Tom, author. Title: Acoustic properties : radio, narrative, and the new neighborhood of the Americas / Tom McEnaney. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series: Flashpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038867 | ISBN 9780810135383 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135390 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135406 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Radio broadcasting—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Radio broadcasting—Political aspects—Cuba—History—20th century. | Radio broadcasting—Political aspects—Argentina—History—20th century. | American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Cuban literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Argentine literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Radio and literature. | Radio authorship. Classification: LCC PN1991.8.L5 M37 2017 | DDC 302.23445 23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038867 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4811992. Contents Preface: Wireless Cultures vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Learning to Listen 3 part i. the new (deal) acoustics 1. “On the National Hookup”: Radio, Character Networks, and U.S.A. 25 2. The Sound of the Good Neighbor: Radio, Realism, and Real Estate 52 3. Struggling Words: Public Housing, Sound Technologies, and the Position of Speech 77 part ii. occupying the airwaves 4. Tears in the Ether: The Rise of the Radionovela 115 5. Radio’s Revolutions 140 part iii. hand- to- hand speech 6. House Taken Over: Listening, Writing and the Politics of the Commonplace in Manuel Puig’s Fiction 169 7. The Ends of Radio: Tape, Property, and Popular Voice 202 Notes 223 Works Cited 287 Index 307 Preface: Wireless Cultures This book is a prehistory of our wireless culture. It examines the coevolution of radio and the novel in the Americas from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the various populist political climates in which a new medium— radio— became the chosen means to produce the voice of the people. As I follow politicians, activists, businessmen, and, above all, writers across these turbulent decades, I also examine how they turned to radio— a technology that helped people transform the air into a commodity— to reconsider the meaning of property and, in the majority of cases, to agitate for more equitable access to, fairer distribution of, and improved living conditions in housing. As with all studies of the past, this book is fundamentally concerned with understanding its present. When I began writing these pages in 2008, voters in the United States, amid the worst financial recession and housing crisis since the Great Depression, had just elected the country’s first African American president on a platform that invoked the country’s most ambitious social programs. While Barack Obama promised a “new, New Deal” in the United States, that same year the political movement known as “Kirchnerismo” in Argentina announced a new Peronist politics under that country’s first directly elected female president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.1 And in Cuba, where Fidel Castro had controlled the government since 1959, Raúl Castro offi- cially assumed the office of the presidency, declaring both a new stage but also a familial continuity in Cuba’s revolutionary history. These vii viii ❘ Preface three dramatic political events carried with them a return to the twen- tieth century’s most influential movements in populist politics: the New Deal, Peronism, and the Cuban Revolution. In this book I focus on those movements and how their different uses of radio sought to channel and control popular power. While the 2008 presidential transitions dominated political head- lines, a new revolution in technological communications and popular wireless computing altered how people connected with each other and shared their voices. Building on the initial release of the iPhone in the summer of 2007, Apple released its first 3G (Third Generation mobile communications) model in 2008, linking the most popular mobile computing device in history to international wireless standards. In the same year, 4G devices appeared: wireless speed and connectivity increased once again, and the new efficiency in connectivity was felt in politics, art, and theory. Although the 2008 presidential transitions and the rapid increase in wireless efficiency that same year are not often discussed together, the connections between wireless computing and popular politics have become a contemporary cliché. There is still much to be said about the Arab Spring (2010), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Black Lives Matter (2012), and other social movements that have demonstrated how social media can enable powerful grassroots political uprisings that focus on people and issues previously invisible or unheard in print, radio, or television news. On the other hand, digital utopians who proclaim the arrival of “free culture” or celebrate the slogan “information wants to be free” ignore the material politics and economics involved in what one radio scholar has called “the problem of information” that radio history makes clear.2 In this book I do not directly take on these contemporary move- ments, but rather I turn back to investigate how previous generations seized on radio— the wireless technology of their day— as they helped create and connect with a popular voice that would call for a more just understanding and use of property. I will detail these claims in the following pages with the hope that what I am calling the prehistory of wireless culture will help us see the contemporary from another angle, or hear it through what Ralph Ellison famously called the “lower fre- quencies.”3 In bringing together literary theory, media archaeology, hemispheric studies, and political history, I aim to show that this histor- ical context and my sustained analysis of novels, radionovelas, poems, and broadcasts that struggled to define their own moment can provide Preface ❘ ix an alternative access point to make sense of our legislative fights over net neutrality, our experience of networked real- time interactivity, and our encounters with the loosely defined populist movements that seem to only increase in power and influence as we move through this new wireless age.4 Against protocol, radio’s new relevance, and its unex- pected importance in the history of the novel and our contemporary culture, might remind us to question apparent obsolescence and to con- tinue seeking out new resources in sustained actions against control. Acknowledgments Although listeners tend to hear the sound of a radio broadcast as if it came from nowhere, it requires a coalition of diligent workers, from the sound engineers, to the DJs, to the designers of the receiver in your car stereo, phone, or computer to assure that the signal reaches you. A book like this is no different. Without the support of multiple friends, colleagues, and institutions, my thoughts about sound would have never made it to the page. Amid all the noise when I first began this book in another form, three people helped me tune in to the most important strains of litera- ture and politics that have guided me through this process. Colleen Lye shared her time and her vast knowledge of socialism and U.S. literature to assure