heard themselves as superior citizens, and they listened to themselves and Others through that privileged, circumscribed, and increasingly standardized filter. I call this dominant racialized filter the listening ear. The listening ear was far from the only listening practice enacted by elite whites during this period and certainly not the only form of listening important in identity construction. As I discussed in the introduction, listening is rich in its multiplicity, and a listening subject develops many filters that operate simultaneously; in fact, a listening subject is comprised of auditory information processed through interactive and intersectional psychological filters that include the habits, assumptions, desires, and repulsions shaped by gender, class, national, regional, and linguistic identities. However uneven and diffused, the listening ear’s emergence during this period, and its transmission to listeners across the American racial spectrum, more firmly interwove whiteness with Americanness, both normalizing the dyad at the heart of citizenship privilege and making it a visceral, tangible, lived experience at the level of auditory perception. In this way, a subject can touch and be touched by the abstraction of race in the form of sound waves—vibrations were increasingly of interest to nineteenth-century physicists, particularly Hermann von Helmholtz—and a subject can cast one’s racial identity out into the world through vocal tones, timbres, music making, soundscape design, noise legislation, music consumption—what Daniel Cavicchi calls “audiencing”6—and through publicly enacting shared forms of exclusionary listening. Listening became a key part of understanding one’s place in the American racial system, viscerally connecting slavery’s macropolitics to lived racial etiquette. The uneven process of building racially disciplined listening through the “ ‘micropenalties’ of disciplinary individuation,”7 as understood by Saidiya Hartman, enabled whites to hear whiteness and blackness as palpably distinct experiences of differing texture, value, quality, and importance, forming what I term the sonic color line.
The racializing of listening, its accordant techniques of body discipline, and the sonic color line enabled by and enabling it, form this chapter’s subject. Racialized sonic politics, I argue, profoundly impacted the ability of black people, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and colonized peoples to claim, enact, and sound their rights in American life, with whites representing black people as the least sonically categorizable as human, let alone as potential citizens. Slave owners, in particular, mobilized the sonic color line as an auditory grammar, which they used to discipline slaves to the white-authored subject position of “blackness,” even as the border coalescing between “black” and “white” sounds, musics, and listening practices cast sonic differences as natural, essential, and immutable. Black listening subjects challenged white-constructed racialized listening practices in ways both subtle and overt: by mobilizing divergent forms of listening, by recoding certain sounds and listening practices as “white” in defiance of American cultural norms deeming whiteness unmarked and unrepresentable, and by using their own standards to construct an alternate value system and aesthetics for sounds they deemed “black.” Furthermore, black subjects survived slavery and resisted America’s racial hierarchies by becoming proficient in multiple forms of racialized listening, slipping in and out of various standpoints to evaluate the micropolitics of any given situation. Since critics such as Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston Baker Jr., Barbara Johnson, Mae Henderson, and Michael Awkward recalibrated Mikhail Bakhtin to think through African American literary representation, double-voicedness has been a predominant critical understanding of how black-authored literary texts perform cultural work in a white supremacist society, using discursive strategies such as signifying and irony to simultaneously address black and white readers on different registers and giving any one text multiple meanings.8 While, as Dorothy Hale has explored, African American literary critics aligned double-voicedness with W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “doubleconsciousness” in order to theorize black subject formation through linguistic acts, literary critics have yet to fully explore doubled—and perhaps even tripled—listening practices, the sensory framework that enables the encoding and decoding of doubled address. My exploration of how African American writers represented and deconstructed the sonic color line and the listening ear helps us understand not only the mechanics of double-voicedness—how and why racialized American readers differently experience the same passages, speeches, musics, voices, and ambient sounds—but also how black subjects constituted themselves through and between various conflicted listening practices that they navigated, brokered, and challenged.
The sonic color line emerged as a ubiquitous and palpable force of racialization in nineteenth-century America, particularly in two of the most well-known contemporary critiques of slavery and its mutually constitutive social relations, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While discursive traces of whites’ use of the sonic color line pepper the popular media of the moment, it was first exposed and rebuked in print by Douglass and Jacobs. Particularly when taken together, their work reveals how white masters and mistresses raced and gendered both sound and listening on the plantation, disciplining themselves and their slaves to the listening ear’s perceptual frame. Most importantly, both writers detail their resistance to the listening ear’s depiction of blackness, highlighting listening as a particularly important site of agency for slaves. African Americans worked to decolonize their listening practices from the inception of the sonic color line, and—co-constitutive with Western imperialization, colonization, and enslavement—they countered the listening ear’s pernicious discipline with individual acts of refusal and communal practices strengthening kinship ties across time and space.
Douglass’s emphasis on the divergent listening practices of black and white subjects in his Narrative shows how they shape (and are shaped by) racial ideologies and everyday disciplinary practices, providing hope that whites could reform their listening ear and that black people can decolonize their listening practices. He exposes and resists the sonic color line while arguing for the importance of slaves’ sounds—in particular, women’s screaming and mixed-gender collective singing—as fundamental to understanding the sensory experience of racism, particularly the construction, gendering, and limitations of the white listening ear and the uneven physical and psychological restraints of white-conditioned listening practices. My reading of Douglass presents a new perspective on a thinker long considered a champion of written literacy and interracial communication, one that considers black listeners alongside his well-documented appeal to “ethnosympathetic” whites.9 I show how Douglass also understood that visual and written modes of knowledge, however unstable, enabled whites to increasingly marginalize sound as emotional and unpredictable—qualities associated with blackness (and femaleness)—even as it continued to perform significant racial labor; however, Douglass also took advantage of publication as a venue to challenge whites’ limited perception and affirm black listeners’ knowledge.
Whereas Douglass’s Narrative takes on the aural edge of racism, Jacobs’s Incidents focuses much more on documenting the aural experience of race, particularly for black women rendered doubly subject to white supremacist patriarchy. Douglass explores the divergent interpretations of black and white men as they listen to white men’s physical abuse of black women, but he does not represent black women as listeners. In Douglass’s Narrative, black women sound; in Jacobs’s Incidents they listen too, developing protective strategies that detect potential sexual abuse and violence in sounds far more subtle than screams. Jacobs’s representation of the intertwined relationship between Linda’s external experience of place and her internal auditory voicings of family provides new understandings of how black people crafted selves and re-storied antebellum environments through embodied listening practices.
In concert, Douglass and Jacobs expose the partiality of white listening practices and the enabling privilege of whites’ purportedly universal interpretations as foundational to white supremacy while simultaneously exploring the sonic color line as a site of possibility, revealing a perceptual gap between black and white audition that harbored life-affirming practices at the microlevel of the senses. Douglass questions the white listening ear’s ability to hear across the color line, while Jacobs seeks refuge in alternative sonic modes of knowing, being, and creating community that challenge the sonic color line at its gendered core. This chapter furthers new critical discussions of the slave narrative and
