“Cries disarticulate the joints in sound that constitute articulation, that is, they expose the nonsense in sense” (20). This is the contention at the heart of Ren Ellis Neyra's engaging and challenging book on the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices – from poetry and performance art to film and court testimonies – contest colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. Ellis Neyra's rubric of “the cry of the senses” draws centrally on Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant's concept of the “cry of the Plantation” (18). The latter is a crucible of voice, sound, and word that erupts from the depths of, and challenges, the dominant logics of a capitalist modernity born from the genocidal conquest of the Americas and the bloody expansion of the Caribbean plantation system. The Cry of the Senses, claims Ellis Neyra, “takes up and plays with, rather than resolving or rationalizing, Western philosophy's rendering of cries as vibrating – pathologically, irrationally, savagely, and hysterically – in the crack forced between (black) animality and (white) humanity” (18). Recuperating or redeeming the cry from its confinement within a colonial epistemology that deems it merely pathological or savage involves recognizing how “the cry's eruption in music, in sex, at birth, and as weeping llanto, alternately marks the embodied, nonwhite racialized, provocative, daily pained limits of language and feeling, as well as political shifts” (18). It also involves a form of “multisensorial poetic listening and sonically oriented close-readings” of texts, artworks, and bodies in performance in order to gauge the way in which they offer alternate, resistant forms of collective listening and being (17).

This is an ambitious book, at the level of both content and form. Focussing primarily on Puerto Rican cultural production, it ranges widely across different media and genres. Cinema, music, artwork, poetry, theatre, and novels are all “listened to” for what they tell of the impact of, and resistance to, “US claims of sovereignty, its capitalist and internally racist disorder, and its fascist economic and military interferences in South American, Central American, Mexican, and Caribbean politics” (75–76). Formally, the book is distinguished by its effort to enact in its writing how it wants to be read and, crucially, felt. Thus “each chapter's texture and affect” varies, so that, for example, “writing with salsa's queer movements in chapter 1 sounds different from writing with a defiant Rican female character in an absurdist play who refuses legal racist and gendered subjection in chapter 2” (8). It is an intriguing strategy and one that genuinely forces the reader to negotiate the complexities, tactility, and resistances of Ellis Neyra's writing, emphasizing the need to develop new modes of relating to texts and to each other.

The opening chapter of The Cry of the Senses focusses on the Fania All-Stars, a group of musicians formed in 1968 as a showcase for the Fania record label's leading salsa performers. Specifically, Ellis Neyra is interested in the audience riot that brought the All-Stars’ 1973 salsa performance at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to an end. The riot, argues Ellis Neyra, “reveals an excessive attachment to the pleasure generated by the music, by being together and sweating in a crowd, and that pleasure's constitutive refusal of the sad script of comporting as good Latina/o/xs” (37). Similarly concerned with how Caribbean and Latinx subjects have “sonically and graphically” defied “the formation of the Enlightenment individual” (55), chapter 2 reads together “two Rican embodied refusals of US sovereignty and their performances of unsovereignty”: the court transcripts of the May 1980 trial of FALN member Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres and Pedro Pietri's play The Masses Are Asses (24, original emphasis). This, for me, is the richest and most suggestive chapter in the book, with its fascinating analysis of how its chosen texts generate “shapes of anti-subjectivity” that articulate a defiant break with imperialist subjugation (61). The following chapter turns to the Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's cinema. Ellis Neyra reads the “sensorial errancy” of Santiago Muñoz's work in relation to the Puerto Rican archipelago's ecology and, in particular, the ongoing legacy of the US Navy's decades of weapons testing in Vieques and Culebra. The final chapter extends the exploration of sensorial solidarity, doing so from the perspective of Chicanx poet Eduardo Corral's 2012 collection Slow Lightning, which draws connections between Mexican and Central American migrancy, historical black fugitivity, queer poetics, and the desert ecology of Sonora (in northwest Mexico) and Arizona.

This is a poetic and thought-provoking study, one marked by its expansive cultural and theoretical reference points and by its effort to enact new modes of sensorial solidarity through its own writing practices. The latter comes at the cost of an occasional lack of analytical clarity and consistency. But overall, The Cry of the Senses represents an important contribution to Caribbean and Latinx studies.