discursive sound constructs, alters, and contests historical memory.57 The Sonic Color Line builds a case for the importance of aural imagery58 and sonic imaginaries—the multiple ways in which we think, write, and represent sound and listening experiences—to cultural history, breaking new ground while enabling fresh readings of canonical literary texts and performances.
While I stage my interventions at the intersection of African American studies and sound studies, I borrow methodologically from cultural studies. Hall’s idea of representation and Roland Barthes’s discussion of adjectives in musical discourse provide crucial connective tissue between language and culture that enables my theoretically informed and historically contextualized close-reading practice to intervene at the critical site where audio intersects the literary and both meet the epistemological: language. Because “music is,” according to Barthes, “by a natural inclination, what immediately receives an adjective,”59 evocative reportage of the voice and sound of African American performers reveals a host of racialized aural representations—the sonic color line—and written traces of racialized listening practices—the listening ear. I use close reading to distill American “sonic protocols”: culturally specific and socially constructed conventions that shape how sound is indexed, valued, and interpreted at any given moment. Like Marjorie Garber, I believe close reading is less about teasing out what something means and much more key to understanding “the way something means.”60 Literary texts not only produce and represent their own sounds61 but also represent and record the process of sound’s social production. The hurried, utilitarian diction of journalism and advertising copy—never intended to be pored over—often provides some of the most profound renderings of the sonic color line, while the densely layered poetic language of literature—conflicting, contradictory, and evocative—frequently attempts to replot that same line, constructing representations that urge readers to hear their world differently.
My genealogy of listening in the United States moves through four eras of musical performance and literary production—antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and World War II—bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, something few sound studies do. Beginning before the invention of the phonograph enables The Sonic Color Line to challenge existing historiographies of sound that give primacy to recording technologies and archives of “actual” sound. Continually privileging recorded texts in the story of sound enacts a kind of technological determinism obscuring how social, cultural, and historical forces mediate sound and audio technologies. While I draw on a number of recorded texts, my study makes a case for written representations as a form of recording, documenting the historical listening practices of the writers themselves. Inspired by Weheliye’s understanding of history as “a series of vexed knots that require the active intervention of the critic or DJ,”62 I “think sound” differently here, digging deeply within the crates of each historical moment under discussion, juxtaposing a wide range of generically diverse sources to create an alternate sense of historical context itself, a transformed “structure of feeling” that takes multiple voices, soundscapes, and socially produced listening practices into account.63
The book begins just before the U.S. Civil War, and its first two chapters detail the rise of the sonic color line as a function of slavery and a site of contestation for America’s new popular culture industry. Chapter 1 reads slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs as literary, theoretical, and historical texts, laying bare the starkly racialized sonics of slavery’s power differentials to examine how and why whites technologized listening as racial discipline and revealing how slaves used listening as resistance and self-preservation. Douglass’s and Jacobs’s aural imagery shows how whites constructed sound as irrational and emotional—in Western culture, the province of women and slaves—and mobilized it to fix race and gender in the body. Both develop the trope of the listener to launch pointed critiques of white listening habits and to amplify listening as an avenue of agency for black people in the struggle to hear and free themselves.
However, as chapter 2 makes clear, the antebellum sonic color line wasn’t confined to the South. It structured life in the North as well, as I show through analysis of the concert reviews of two female singers who ascended to center stage in the nation’s burgeoning popular culture industry: “the Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, “the Black Swan.” The growing conflict over women’s rights made these women’s voices hyperaudible sites of raced and gendered conflict in the public sphere, and the racialized tropes of audible “whiteness” and “blackness” emerging from the dueling divas’ media flurry disciplined the dominant U.S. listening ear with raced and gendered logics inflecting scientific breakthroughs regarding timbre and sound vibrations.
Chapter 3 locates the sonic color line’s next big shift during Radical Reconstruction, examining how developing sound recording technology in the 1870s was preceded and anticipated by the intensive repetition of the Jubilee Singers’ corporeal performance and the techniques of phonography explored by writer Chesnutt. Building on Moten’s notion of the intertwined nature of resistance and subjection, this chapter examines “the black voice” itself as a sonic technology of Reconstruction that interrogated and soothed America’s bloody racial history and the rifts of the recent Civil War. Both the Jubilee Singers and Chesnutt used the trope of the listener to gain representational control of the historical memory of slavery, challenging dominant racial narratives locating race in the blood and defining black people as cultureless, uneducable, and unassimilable. The Jubilees and Chesnutt succeeded in shifting definitions of “authentic” blackness away from blackface performance; however, mainstream American media outlets appropriated their representations to shore up a new sonic image of blackness focused on sounds of suffering.
The sonic color line’s third major shift occurred at the intersection of music, sound cinema, and lynching during the Great Depression and the Great Migration. Here the sonic color line skewed toward circumscribing public performances of black masculinity, which I trace by interweaving the late-1930s musical career of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter with the early fiction of his friend and contemporary, author Richard Wright. Folklorist John Lomax strategically sold Lead Belly’s music to white audiences as the thrilling, authentic sound of the “to-be-lynched” body, enabled by and enabling the sonic color line to “match” black male bodies with particular voices and musics. But as synchronous sound cinema displaced “silent” films during this era, the notion of the “sound track” introduced new possibilities for listening that unsettled established relationships between sound and the visual image. Using new cinematic techniques, Wright’s fiction from this period challenges Lomax’s representation of Ledbetter by “soundtracking” lynching and segregation, creating a decolonizing practice intervening in “the ideology of the visible”64 while simultaneously exposing sound’s invisible ideological freight, carrying lynching far beyond the South and racial segregation across spatial color lines.
The book closes amidst World War II’s immediate aftermath, showing how the sonic color line not only enabled the racial formation we now know as “color blindness” but also surreptitiously became race’s lingua franca. Radio, in particular, was a technology of the sonic color line, developing and circulating new acousmatic sonic protocols of racialized sounding and listening no longer dependent on immediate bodily presence. Building upon Ledbetter and Wright’s depictions of the sonic color line within segregated Northern cities, I show how radio broadcasts and production practices reproduced raced and gendered urban spaces and enabled the emerging discourse of color blindness. I begin by investigating the subtle racing of singer Lena Horne’s voice over the 1940s airwaves, focusing on how and why her vocal crossing—and resistant performances—threatened the nation’s underlying racial order. Like Horne, a vocal critic of radio’s increasingly subtle racializations and hidden exclusions, Du Bois critiqued radio via his social theory in Dusk of Dawn, emphasizing America’s movement away from the linear and visual metaphor of the color line to a figuration of race as a plate-glass vacuum chamber, an aural metaphor influenced, I argue, by his work as a
