Neville Austin Graduate Colloquium Series | Ana Alonso-Minutti (University of New Mexico)

Topic: "Domestic Noises as Decolonial Praxis: Chicana Feminist Experimentation in Private Spaces"

Location: Room 130 of Edward Johnson Building.

This presentation explores how the private sphere is transformed into a space of resistance and creation through experimental sonic practices. Drawing on Amalia Mesa-Bains’ “domesticana” aesthetic (1995), which proposes the home as a critical site of political and cultural expression, I examine how Chicana and Indigenous artists use noise as a decolonial strategy. I argue that, while rooted in an intimate context, their work activates a feminist practice that subverts colonialist and patriarchal hierarchies within the private sphere.

Ana Alonso-Minutti, Associate Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds (Oxford UP, 2023), which received the American Musicological Society’s Robert M. Stevenson Award. In 2024, she was honored with the Distinguished Lectureship Cátedra Jesús C. Romero by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts. She currently serves as co-editor of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge UP).

The Colloquium Series is made possible in part by a generous gift from Neville Austin.