Together, these books mark the latest turn in American literary and cultural studies. Focusing on mainland-US and Puerto Rican popular song, they filter arguments about race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality through historical studies, music studies, and sound studies. In the wake of the temporal turn, itself a post-spatial-turn development, turning to sound studies makes perfect sense. As Alain Corbin observed in his classic 1994 study of church bells in nineteenth-century rural France, Village Bells, bells limned both space and time, functioning to forge community and to orient those traveling within their sound-space. Functionality likewise connects these books; all argue for the positive impact of the cultural work performed by their subjects. The books themselves, too, perform a reorienting function in that all aim to correct a historical record. In the words of Fiol-Matta, all four “move to unsettle matters, not affirm them” (5).
In Woody Guthrie’s Modern World...
