loud and unruly “Other.”21 Noise is not merely loudness measured in decibels. Like recordist and theorist Tony Schwartz, I maintain that noise depends on the ear of the beholder. “Noise is an editorial word,” Schwartz argues. “When you talk about noise, you are talking about sound that is bothering you. There’s no party so noisy as the one you’re not invited to.”22 I consider noise a shifting analytic that renders certain sounds—and the bodies that produce and consume them—as Other, what Cornel West describes as “incomprehensible and unintelligible” under white supremacist epistemologies.23 While cultural uses of “noise” are not exclusive to race—the noise of industry, for example, or of sporting events—I refer specifically to how the sonic color line invokes noise in direct connection to (or as a metonymic stand-in for) people of color, and particularly blackness. The sound of hip-hop pumped at top volume through car speakers, for example, has become a stand-in for the bodies of young black men in American culture; noise ordinances seeking to “tame the boom car monster”—words used in Rochester, New York—allow for racial profiling without ever explicitly mentioning race.24 Sometimes tolerated, but more often fetishized as exotic or demonized as unassimilable, noise and loudness frequently function as aural substitutes for and markers of race and form key contours of the sonic color line that I map out in this book: music/noise (throughout), word/sound, sense/nonsense (chapter 1), cultivated/raw, controlled/excessive (chapter 2), proper/improper, assimilable/foreign, listener/performer (chapter 3), quiet/loud, smooth/rough (chapter 4), and cold/emotional (chapter 5).
To expose the historical genealogy of dominant listening practices and to provide new critical tools to deconstruct and dismantle “race” via its sonic register, I offer the listening ear as the ideological filter shaped in relation to the sonic color line. The listening ear represents a historical aggregate of normative American listening practices and gives a name to listening’s epistemological function as a modality of racial discernment. An aural complement to and interlocutor of the gaze, the listening ear is what Judith Butler calls “a constitutive constraint”25: a socially constructed ideological system producing but also regulating cultural ideas about sound. The listening ear enables the key dichotomies of the sonic color line traced in this book; it normalizes the aural tastes and standards of white elite masculinity as the singular way to interpret sonic information. From the antebellum era through the mid-twentieth century, the American listening ear developed through multiple, intersecting representational discourses to process dominant ways of sounding as default—natural, normal, and desirable—while deeming alternate ways of listening and sounding aberrant.
I also build the listening ear from Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline and “the way in which the body itself is invested in power relations.”26 Disciplinary processes greatly inform my approach to listening and its tense, mutually constitutive relationship with shifting racial ideologies. Foucault mainly speaks of sensory discipline through visual surveillance and the concept of the gaze, most famously through Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the Enlightenment prison whose architecture enabled jailers to watch prisoners without being seen. As Les Bull and Michael Back point out, Foucault’s theorizations neglect that Bentham also built auditory surveillance into his prison: a series of hidden, connected tubes allowed the wardens to listen in at will.27 The Sonic Color Line takes up Bull and Back’s provocation, using Foucault’s insights on discipline and training, to flesh out a “history of listening” that is theoretical, embodied, and sensitive to power, particularly the processes of subjection, racialization, and nationalism.28 Since the establishment of slavery and the codification of Jim Crow laws in its wake, listening has greatly impacted how bodies are categorized according to racial hierarchies and how raced subjects imagined themselves and negotiated a thoroughly racialized society.
This book identifies the processes enabling some listeners to hear themselves as “normal” citizens—or, to use legal discourse, “reasonable”—while compelling Others to understand their sonic production and consumption—and therefore themselves—as aberrant. Essentially, one’s ideas about race shape what and how one hears and vice versa. Although often deemed an unmediated physical act, listening is an interpretive, socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations. While speculative philosophic work such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening—which decouples listening from automatic connection with understanding and reminds us that “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning”29—has been helpful, I theorize listening as a historical and material practice, one both lived and artistically imagined. I show the dangers and the stakes of grand narratives through archival documentation of a specific racialized filter developed in the United States in the 1840s and the resistance mounted to it by black artists and thinkers. The listening ear is far from the only form of listening; however, it is a stance wielding much power, intersecting with and impacting the many other widely variable practices we experience collectively as “listening.”
Occurring at the intersection of class, sexuality, gender, and race, listening offers an epistemological venue for our particular embodiments; our embodiments, in turn, filter incoming sound along various indices of classification and value. A footstep outside a window at night, for example, can have divergent meanings for men and women, and a different resonance for a white mistress than for a black female slave, an example taken up in chapter 2. I use “embodied ear” to represent how individuals’ listening practices are shaped by the totality of their experiences, historical context, and physicality, as well as intersecting subject positions and particular interactions with power (the listening ear).30 I hope that coupling “embodied” and “ear” will remind us of the relationship between ideology and materiality as well as the important interventions of deaf-studies scholars to expand notions of listening beyond an inaccurate focus on the ear as its sole source. Steph Ceraso, for example, urges us to think of listening as “multimodal,” vibrations experienced by the entire body and interpreted in conjunction with other senses, while Cara Lynne Cardinale challenges sound studies to consider a radical deafness in which sign language and “look-listening” point to the limits of sound and language (rather than reveal lacks).31
Although one filter among many, the listening ear exerts pressure on the embodied ear’s numerous listening practices, naturalizing the sonic color line as the singular—and often the most pressing—way to process aural information. In outlining how listening operates as a form of racial subjection, I wish neither to fetishize the listening ear nor to make its own unevenness and complexity into a monolith. Instead, I theorize the listening ear as a singular term because my archive tells me it works by attempting to suppress and reduce an individual’s myriad, fine-grained embodied listening experiences by shunting them into narrow, conditioned, and “correct” responses that are politically, culturally, economically, legally, and socially advantageous to whites. At times, the listening ear appears monolithic precisely because that is what it strives to be. From antebellum slavery to mid-twentieth-century color blindness, the listening ear has evolved to become the only way to listen, interpret, and understand; in legal discourse, the listening ear claims to be how any “reasonable person” should listen.
“Un-airing” the Past: Methodologies of the Sonic Color Line
I locate my work on the sonic color line as part of a collective project within African American literary and cultural studies to, as Carter Mathes contends, “emphasize the sonic as a conceptual field that might facilitate the radical projection of African American experience.”32 Earlier generations of critics theorized black diasporic writing in terms of sound, particularly Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and Stuart Hall, who argued that sound is a large part of what is “black” about black popular culture.
In its expressivity,
