Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Talking Machine Empires is a cultural history of the dawn of the sound recording industry in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is also a colonial history of sound recording ventures in the Global South between 1877 and 1925, before microphones and loudspeakers. Sending recording expeditions to the realms of the cultural Other, mobilizing performers from one continent to another, getting them into recording laboratories, taking for granted their labor and talent, and profiting from all of that are some of the details that explain the swift globalization of recorded sound in the early twentieth century, as well as the asymmetries that continue to shape the worlds of music and entertainment today. It is also a history of intercultural exchanges around and through recorded media and a history of musical innovation, resistance, and cultural autonomy despite and because of the unevenness of corporate imperialism and the resilience of coloniality. This book examines the business and imperial cycles of the sound recording industry in Latin America and the Caribbean during the acoustic era: unrelenting sequences of production, circulation, and consumption of phonographic commodities and of mechanical sound at large. Each chapter delves into different processes, themes, and relations within and across those cycles, namely the formation of talking machine empires, the deployment of recording expeditions, the commodification of talent, the making of acoustic records, the musical and theatrical content of the recordings, the transnational circulation of talking machine and records, and the stakes of phonograph culture for everyday life.</jats:p>