Book review: Castellano CG,Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times

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.

The introduction outlines the historical and cultural specificity of the Cádiz Carnival while positioning it within broader global dynamics of neoliberal restructuring, precarity and political disaffection. Crucially, the author establishes the book’s central claim: that carnival sonics constitute a situated form of political thinking emerging from collective cultural practice rather than from institutionalised political discourse. Within this framework, temporality emerges as a key analytical thread, as the author argues that

Transgression and radical creativity beg for an alternative understanding of time and temporality, one that challenges the idea of the eternal (and eternally controlled), murderous ‘now’ of neoliberal ideologies while making space for the reverberation of a new time determined by the coexistence of past, present and future forms of transgression (p. 24).

The analysis draws on a range of empirical materials, including specific carnival performances, song lyrics and contemporary groups, which are read in relation to broader social and political transformations. The first chapter examines how carnival performances articulate forms of resistance to dominant political narratives. Particularly noteworthy is the way these performances activate historical memory: they bring the past into friction with the present, exposing unresolved tensions within contemporary political life. In doing so, carnival emerges as a site where alternative modes of political intelligibility are rehearsed and made audible, while also functioning as a site of resistance within a field of memory increasingly manipulated and instrumentalised by neoliberal forms of political communication.

Afterwards, the author shifts attention to the changing conditions of cultural production in the digital age. By analysing the intersection between music production, digital circulation and popular subjectivity, the author situates carnival practices within wider discussions of precarious labour and the neoliberal restructuring of cultural production. At the same time, the chapter highlights the ambivalent role of social media, which can function both as a space of amplification for collective voices and as a mechanism of fragmentation and individualisation.

Questions of gender and feminist activism are addressed in the third chapter, grounded in Kristeva’s (1982) notion of abjection. Garrido Castellano examines how feminist interventions displace what has traditionally been abjected—feminised, excluded or devalued forms of expression—bringing them into visibility within the collective space of the carnival. In doing so, feminist critiques challenge entrenched gender hierarchies while also generating new modes of collective enunciation. Particularly insightful is the discussion of the tensions that arise when long-standing popular traditions encounter contemporary feminist politics. This tension resonates with broader debates within cultural studies on the relationship between feminist critique and popular cultural forms, particularly regarding the extent to which such interventions can transform, rather than be reabsorbed into, existing structures of representation and power.

Later in the book, and continuing this engagement with feminist theory, Garrido Castellano examines the role of movement, rhythm and collective presence in carnival gatherings. Garrido Castellano argues that practices such as dancing and collective singing generate forms of social interaction that resist the individualising logics of neoliberal culture by emphasising co-presence, synchronisation and shared affect. This shift towards embodiment enriches the book’s overall argument by demonstrating that sonic politics cannot be fully understood without attending to the corporeal and spatial dimensions of collective performance.

The book’s final chapter invites readers to reconsider carnival sound as part of a broader planetary assemblage, where voices, bodies, animals and infrastructures coexist and interact (Haraway, 2015). Although this perspective is only tentatively developed, it introduces a novel and productive line of inquiry that reframes sonic politics within contemporary ecological debates. By pointing towards the interconnectedness of cultural practices and environmental concerns, the chapter opens an important avenue for future research on the multispecies and more-than-human acoustic ecology. At the same time, this move towards more-than-human frameworks resonates with wider debates in cultural studies and environmental humanities, particularly regarding how to account for material and ecological entanglements without losing sight of the social and political inequalities that structure cultural experience.

Beyond its detailed engagement with the Cádiz Carnival, Chorus makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates within cultural studies concerning the relationship between cultural production, power and collective life under neoliberal conditions. In particular, the book’s focus on sonic practices as sites of political articulation resonates with broader discussions on affect, embodiment and the politics of everyday life, while also extending these debates by foregrounding collective voice as a mode of resistance to individualising logics.

Chorus offers a substantial and timely contribution, bringing renewed attention to the political significance of sound and collective performance. Particularly compelling is its sustained engagement with the notion of ‘tragic times’, through which the book foregrounds practices that resist the presentist and homogenising logics of technocapitalism by reactivating alternative temporalities grounded in repetition, memory and collective experience. At certain points, its conceptual scope slightly exceeds the empirical detail of the case studies, leaving some internal complexities less fully explored. Nevertheless, this does not detract from the overall strength of the work. Rather, Chorus opens new avenues for research, positioning sonic practices as key sites for understanding how collective agency is lived, negotiated and contested in everyday cultural practices. It will be of clear interest to scholars working across cultural studies, sound studies and the study of popular culture.