Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME)
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The Florida Room

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posted on 2022-11-04, 01:18 authored by Alexandra Vazquez

In The Florida Room Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to offer a lush story of place and people, movement and memory, dispossession and survival. She transforms the “Florida room”—an actual architectural phenomenon—into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami’s musical cultures and everyday life. Drawing on songs, ephemera, and oral histories from artists, families, and inheritors of their traditions, Vazquez hears Miami as a city that has long been shaped by Indigenous Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and southern Georgia. She draws connections between seemingly disparate artists, sounds, and stories, from singer Gwen McCrae to pirate radio innovator DJ Uncle Al, from the Miccosukee rock band Tiger Tiger to the Cuban-American songwriter Desmond Child, among the percussionists Dafnis Prieto, Obed Calvaire, and Yosvany Terry, and through the notes of Eloise Lewis, Betty Wright, and the Miami Bass group Anquette. By listening to musical collaborations and ancestral ties across place and time, Vazquez brings together formal musical details, the histories of people and locations they hold, and the aesthetic traditions transformed inside them.

Funding

NYU as part of the TOME initiative

History

Publication date

2022

ISBN (Open Access)

9781478092704

ISBN (Print - Cloth)

9781478015307

ISBN (Print - Paper)

9781478017929

ISBN (Ebook For Sale)

9781478022541

Publisher Name

Duke University Press