Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

"Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching...Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a 'sea of mirrors,' into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn." -Loretta Collins-Klobah

Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms . held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels. - Mervyn Taylor