and, above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation.33
Within academia’s historically logocentric white supremacist structures, these thinkers launched new ways of conceiving of aesthetics, value, history, theory, and memory. But while they centralized music to reconceive black literary aesthetics, their analysis remained largely structural and metaphoric.34 Building from these broad strokes, scholars—guided by Daphne Brooks, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Fred Moten, Gayle Wald, and Weheliye—have recently retheorized the relationship between black performance practice and writing as mutually informative. This critical move enables contemporary scholars to engage with the sonics of black cultural production on a more granular level—a “search for resonances” in Emily Lordi’s terms and a “listening in detail” in Alexandra Vazquez’s methodology—within a wider social and historical context.35 Scholars can now listen to the unique ways in which African American artists mobilize sound beyond structuring principle and as so much more than an object: as event, experience, affect, archive, and, as Shana Redmond argues, method.36
By tracing a historical conversation between black writers and musicians about the racial politics of listening, this book makes three interventions in the study of African American literature. First, I amplify black performers and writers as theorists of listening, using aural imagery and musical strategies to explore listening as a form of agency, a technique of survival, an ethics of community building, a practice of self-care, a guide through racialized space, a site of racialization, and a mode of decolonizing. Second, current approaches to the sonics of African American literature have focused more intensely on literature and music considered explicitly “experimental,” beginning with the black arts movement. By locating my study in the hundred-year period just before the Civil Rights Movement, I break down the experimental/traditional binary, articulating what Mathes calls the “imaginative landscape of experimental sonority” in contemporary black writing with more “realist” forms, such as the slave narrative, framed vernacular tale, and social protest novel.37 By listening to works by writers such as Jacobs, Chesnutt, and Wright—and foregrounding how these authors conceived and represented listening itself—I argue that we can hear the radical aurality and sonic aesthetics of their work submerged by time, shifts in aesthetics, and limited readings of their artistry as sociological description and/or mere vehicles for racial liberalism. Earlier black writers and musicians experimented with aural imagery to radically challenge the mobilization of sound by white power structures, and they did it with style. I take seriously Ann Petry’s 1950 rejoinder to critics that the “craftsmanship that goes into [social protest novels] is of a high order. It has to be.”38 Finally, I identify a new signifyin(g) chain within the black literary tradition, the “trope of the listener”: scenes focused on characters’ listening experience as their primary sense. According to Gates, black literature’s “ur-trope” is the “talking book,” a recurrent metaphor in the earliest slave narratives such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Shifting the discussion from the “talking book” to “the listener” enables us to conceive a more complex interrelationship between orality—what is spoken—and aurality—what is heard—as epistemes of knowledge production and forms of resistance to (and within) written expression. By amplifying the trope of the listener, I invite scholars to hear a new “web of filiation”39 between texts, one that uses sound to signify between genres and across wide swaths of time—revealing dissonances in listening practices and uncomfortable historical affinities—and the literary soundscape itself as a form of double-voicedness. Despite the ubiquity and richness of sound in most novels, the visual image still dominates literary analysis; I direct scholars toward literary soundscapes as a subject of critical attention.40
Learning to listen differently to race, gender, power, place, and history brought me to “sound studies,” not the other way around; however, the field’s methodological freedom greatly enabled my scholarship in African American literature, music, and history. As you will see in this book, I meet sound where, when, and in what form I find it, not as an object of study, but as a method enabling an understanding of race as an aural experience with far-reaching historical and material resonance. Recent critiques of the field for its broad perspective on sound mistake methodological innovation for playing fast and loose, claiming “the generalizability of sound, in its most imprecise uses, can sidestep the effects of institutional histories and the structuring influence of entrenched debates.”41 To this description, ironically, I say, “Exactly!” One way to read this book is as an extended, historically and theoretically grounded argument for such “sidesteps” in and as sound studies, methodological moves made not to avoid contending with established music history, but rather as a strategy of critical sonar to navigate the epistemological terrain that “music”—as a culturally specific, politically charged, and “entrenched” category of value—can obscure. The history of the sonic color line and the listening ear should compel scholars to question music’s cultural and institutional privilege rather than assuming it because allegedly “music studies predates sound studies by two millennia.”42 Rearticulating music as a culturally and historically conditioned form of sound in political relation to (and flowing from, and toward) other sounds—none of which exist, as Gustavus Stadler reminds us, “outside of [their] perception by specifically marked subjects and bodies within history”—offers a deeper understanding of how and why music means, and to whom. The Sonic Color Line’s deliberate archival “sidesteps” also function as much-needed historiographical echolocation through and beyond “the overwhelming whiteness of scholars in the field,”43 tracing a much longer, broader, and blacker history of thinking and writing sound, enabling us to hear theorists, artists, writers, and thinkers silenced by institutional histories built on their very exclusion.
Since I began this research, the field of sound studies has grown exponentially, to the point where we can no longer say the field is “emerging.” Work on sound and race has appeared much more slowly—in part because of the processes this book explores—but recent special issues of Social Text, American Quarterly, and Radical History Review centralized interdisciplinary conversations about sound, race, citizenship, subjectivity, and the body.44 Liana Silva and Aaron Trammell and I also cofounded Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog in 2009 explicitly to address the whiteness and maleness of institutionalized “sound studies” and the field’s inattention to power in its research agenda. As editor-in-chief, I publish scholarship directing the field’s energy toward sound’s social, cultural, and political contexts, in particular how listening constructs and impacts variously positioned bodies.
This book stages four key interventions in sound studies’ critical conversation on race and sound. First, I revise the increasingly canonized and overwhelmingly white and male historiography of sound studies, which neglects the work by black writers, thinkers, and scholars on sound and listening dating back at least a hundred and fifty years. I challenge sound studies to consider black artists as theorists and agents of sound, rather than solely as performers or producers. Second, I push existent discourse on sound and race to consider whiteness as an auditory construction. In particular, I identify how black cultural producers have used aural imagery to amplify and challenge how white power structures have mobilized sound to define black racial identities, drawing attention to how whiteness constitutes itself through sonic markers and sounded exclusions. Third, I add significantly to sound studies’ overarching project to trace a “history of listening,” through meticulous archival documentation of various listening practices and by insisting that histories of listening are always multiple, not only enmeshed in the matrices of social difference and power but also helping to constitute them. Finally, identifying the sonic color line as an externally imposed difference opens up possibilities for new forms of agency through listening. Building from Hall’s notion of “decolonized sensibilities,”45 I show how the proliferation of multiple and diverse black listening practices is itself a form of resistance to the colonizing idea that—in order to have the rights and privileges of national citizenship and at times, shockingly, to be considered human—one has to listen similarly to power: valuing the same sounds in the same ways
