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The Quiet Zone

Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance

by Petal Kimberly Samuel

Paperback

$34.95

Hardback

$120.00

eBook (ePub)

$34.95

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Price:: $34.95
ISBN:: 9781978844704
Published:: Jan 13, 2026

Release Date:: 13th January 2026
Publisher:: Rutgers University Press
Imprint:: Rutgers University Press
Series:: Critical Caribbean Studies
Pages:: 220

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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 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

"The Quiet Zone is a groundbreaking work of Black feminist criticism that redefines Caribbean soundscapes. With eloquence, rigor, and bold interdisciplinary insight, Petal Samuel reveals how Afro-Caribbean women and queer artists transform sonic disturbance into a powerful aesthetic of resistance, unsettling colonial fantasies and asserting radical forms of presence, creativity, and self-sovereignty."
- Kaiama L. Glover

"In this brilliant study, 'quiet,' 'noise,' and 'sound' are never just one thing. Restorative quiet and the aesthetic investment in beauty, subtlety, and modulation are deemed the exclusive domain of the deserving—violently denied to others as a mark of their dispossession. Sound may represent a respite from the violent scrutiny of state and nation, but also from those severe postures demanded of family and community to counter antiblackness. In astute readings of fiction, memoir, poetry, film, and performance across a range of archives and disciplinary methods, Petal Samuel takes us to unexpected places and conclusions, showing that we often desire that which we fear and inspiring us to listen—and to imagine—against the grain."
- Faith Smith

PETAL KIMBERLY SAMUEL is assistant professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work on African diasporic women’s writing, Caribbean feminist and queer literary aesthetics, and Black speculative imagination has appeared in the Journal of West Indian Literature, The Black Scholar, Differences, and Public Books. Her current work and scholarly interests include Caribbean anticolonial literature and aesthetics, the sensorium, and transnational Black feminist thought.