Book review: Castellano CG, Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times CastellanoCG (2026) Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times. Liverpool University Press. 264 pp. £96 (hardback). ISBN 9781805967552 (hardback).
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Across recent debates in cultural studies, increasing attention has been paid to the political dimensions of sound, affect and collective performance, particularly as sites where social inequalities, forms of resistance and modes of collective life are negotiated in everyday contexts.From protest chants to sonic occupations of public space, auditory practices have been increasingly understood as embedded in material conditions of existence and in historically situated relations of power that shape who can speak, be heard and participate in the production of the social (James, 2019).It is within this framework that Carlos Garrido Castellano's Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times can be read.Focusing on the Cádiz Carnival, the book approaches carnival not simply as a cultural form but as a situated and contested social practice through which issues such as precarity, historical memory, gender and collective belonging are articulated.Through a theoretically ambitious engagement with carnival music, Garrido Castellano shows how sonic practices function as forms of political intervention grounded in lived experience, collective voice and participatory cultural production.At the centre of Garrido Castellano's argument lies the concept of the chorus.It appears as a figure of collective agency capable of generating alternative forms of sociality and political imagination in the tragic conditions of the present politics.In this sense, the book resonates with Eagleton's idea of modern tragedy: 'perhaps the ultimate tragedy would be a condition in which we were so careless of human value that we would no longer be able to mourn' (Eagleton, 2020: 26).Garrido Castellano conceptualises the chorus as a mode of collective enunciation that resists this 'tragic' individualisation and foregrounds relationality, pointing towards alternative forms of collective articulation that challenge the individualising logics of contemporary neoliberalism.
Author: Elena Merino Rivera
Institution: Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7166525776