Petal Kimberly Samuel, "The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

About this episode

Petal Kimberly Samuel discusses her book 'The Quiet Zone', exploring the implications of quiet as an elite aesthetic in Caribbean cultures.

A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone : Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire. Learn more about your ad choices…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Petal Kimberly Samuel

Topics covered

• Caribbean studies
• feminist aesthetics
• sonic surveillance
• cultural critique
• racial identity
• quiet as privilege

Keywords

• Caribbean
• feminist aesthetics
• sonic discipline
• Afro-Caribbean artists
• cultural critique
• racial belonging
• quiet leisure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rutgers UP

Places: Caribbean, Black

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