Mariane Stanev

I am a diasporic Brazilian and gender queer Miami “girl.” In both places I’ve learned to call home, sound makes up an enormous part of people's identity. In Brazil, as a white signifying member of the urban middle class society of São Paulo, I learned not to be caught dead enjoying rhythms that would make me seem any less white. In Miami, I applied that training by learning to distance myself from the rhythms of the Hispanophone South American and Caribbean diasporas, carefully crafting my sonic identity as not one of “those” Latin people.

My dissertation project analyzes how such sonic prejudices are internalized and how they can be subverted. My research combines intimate familial histories, archival research, storytelling, and a lot of learning to listen to sound and people differently. My work is fueled by an urge to contextualize my family's history in the frames of thought cultivated by colonial Brazilian society and by a need to speak to diasporic Latinx grandkids about their grandfolks, especially, but not necessarily primarily, to white passing grandkids.

My archival research on “Linguagem dos Sinos,” or “The Language of Bells,” combined with my own experiences as a queer diasporic Latinx instrumentalist, poet, and writer, and fueled by the storytelling prowess of my grandmothers, paints a picture of the lingering effects of colonial social paradigms on sonic identity and production in the Latinx diaspora.

My project seeks to help crack, or make brittle the colonial molds of being to which we subject our sonic identities. It is my goal for those who read my work can hear the voices of their family matriarchs and start remembering: No, she wasn't crazy, she was angry. No, her anger wasn't petty or mean, she remembered something that was meant to be forgotten  No, Native People didn't disappear in the 16th century. No, though it tried, 20th century ideology did not create cultural homogeneity. No, recent European ancestry gives you no right to forget your India grandma. And most importantly: Absolutely under no circumstances does it make any sense that their cultures, ways of knowing, and sonic presence in your own flesh would have vanished in such short historical notice.