A sonic island: aurality, literature and politics in the written and radio works of Severo Sarduy (Cuba, 1937-France, 1993

My dissertation focuses on aurality, literature, and politics in Severo Sarduy. The central notion is transduction, a conceptual frame to analyze the mediations activated when soundscapes become sonic imaginaries. At the same time, I propose transduction as a tool for critical-genetic studies of transmedial archives such as Sarduy’s. One of its most significant contributions is the analysis of Sarduy’s broadcasts on Radio France, an overlooked area of his production. As part of his interest in exploring the possibilities of the sensorium to generate policies of resistance and individual and collective liberation, Sarduy was not only interested in visuality—the most studied area of his poetics—but also in aurality. Working with the silence/noise dichotomy, which he understood as complementary, and the opposition of these poles to a conception of sound as harmonic led Sarduy towards a multiphonic, anti-totalitarian and anti-colonial sonic imaginary. I reposition his work as a radio journalist and producer and his emotional use of devices to capture, manipulate, and reproduce sounds as crucial areas of his artistic praxis. That aural praxis is also responsible for his politics of listening to the various soundscapes he traversed and building echo chambers to transduce those soundscapes. Complementary outcomes of my research are published online on Listening to Severo Sarduy.