one’s listening practices and challenging their predisposed affects, reactions, and interpretations are fundamental for the development of new ways of being in the world and for forging cross-racial solidarities capable of dismantling the sonic color line and the racialized listening practices enabling and enabled by it. Marta Savigliano argues, building on Frantz Fanon, that decolonization “entails learning/unlearning the preeminence of abstract totalizing Enlightenment logics over bodies and their often absurd techniques of survival.”46 While my use of “decolonization” may seem anachronistic—my book ends shortly before a large wave of uprisings led by black and brown peoples against colonial powers in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean—it highlights that decolonizing does not begin after revolutions but rather that decolonized people lead revolutions. Decolonizing begins at colonization, and listening, in particular, is an important method to access freedom, agency, power, and selfhood.
Although intimately intertwined with constructions of “blackness” and “whiteness,” the sonic color line and the listening ear have resonance beyond the racialized subject positions of black and white. Other racial and ethnic groups in the United States are subject to aural stereotyping, “linguistic profiling,” and discriminatory listening practices.47 I have written about the racialization of sound in other historical and social contexts—particularly in the cases of Puerto Rican migration to New York City in the 1950s and current anti-immigration legislation directed against Latina/os in the American Southwest—however, this project focuses specifically on the mutually constitutive relationship between sound/listening and the U.S. black and white racial hierarchy between 1845 and 1945.48 As Sharon Holland argues, “in calls to abandon the black/white dichotomy for more expansive readings of racism’s spectacular effects, critics often ignore the psychic life of racism,” precisely the site where The Sonic Color Line lingers.49 I do not study the black/white paradigm as the only important difference in the United States, but rather I question how and why the myth of “blackness” and “whiteness” as polarities—one hopelessly abject, the other powerfully “normal”—persists and adjusts to changing demographics and historical circumstances. Despite copious amounts of scholarship documenting the complexities of the U.S. racial spectrum, the black/white binary still retains an enormous amount of symbolic weight and material consequence.50 The black/white binary has never been about descriptive accuracy, but rather it is a deliberately reductionist racial project constructing white power and privilege against the alterity and abjection of the imagined polarity of “blackness” and the transfer of this power across generations and (white) ethnicities, what Cheryl Harris calls “whiteness as property” and George Lipsitz dubbed “the possessive investment in whiteness.”51 This project does not assume that what is true for some black people is true for all marginalized peoples, as the logic of the black/white binary would have it; rather, my exploration produces a more complicated understanding of how white and black people have mobilized sonic signifiers at particular historical junctures to produce, enable, circumscribe, and challenge dominant notions of “blackness,” one of the sharpest edges of the sonic color line, and “whiteness,” its bluntest instrument of power.
While my main theoretical emphasis in The Sonic Color Line is race, my research remains deeply attuned to gender’s impact on listening and vice versa. I regard race and gender as intersectional political identities experienced simultaneously and in a complex, highly contextual relationship; both race and gender—along with sexuality and class—impact how one sounds and listens. The Sonic Color Line is mindful of how, as Christine Ehrick argues, “gender is also represented, contested, and reinforced through the aural,”52 in particular through its detailed examinations of sound and listening in a geographical and historical context. Our experiences of race are necessarily linked to our gendered identities; our gender identities cannot be conceived separately from our racialized experience, an idea infusing this book, beginning with Jacobs’s struggle to show the raced edge of the notion that white American women in the nineteenth century had “delicate ears,” and concluding with Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of Petry’s The Street, being stalked aggressively by the particular form of silence black women face in a white supremacist America, what Kimberly Foster calls “the terror of being uncared for.”53
Petry and several other writers in this book reveal how very deeply the contexts of race and gender continue to matter—and remain controversial—in the reception of so-called universal sounds, such as screams. Although a June 2015 study by psychologists and neural scientists at New York University and the University of Geneva concluded that “screams are the one uncontroversially universal vocalization,” I maintain that the sonic color line’s disciplining of the senses disrupts notions of “universal” listening. In certain contexts, for example, and depending on the listener, a black woman’s scream is heard differently from a white woman’s, even if both screams displayed similar properties of pitch, tone, timbre, and volume; the sonic color line maps divergent impacts and meanings for these two sounds, as dependent on the race and gender of the listener as they are on the perceived race and gender of the screamer. Douglass, for instance, notices the sound of his Aunt Hester screaming caused the slave master to whip her harder and longer, while in Wright’s fiction, even the thought of a white woman screaming sets murders, lynchings, and mass migrations in motion. Both these examples also show how masculinity is experienced through and bound up with listening. While the slave master hears his sexual potency and power in Hester’s screams, Douglass hears his inability, as both child and slave, to help his beloved aunt, which drives him toward an understanding of listening as ethical involvement. Wright shows how the white female scream hovers in the nation’s sonic imaginary as confirmation of a rapacious black masculinity, and how this sound warps white men toward violence and just plain warps black men, who grow up knowing this scream heralds death.
In examining the relation between raced and gendered perception, I am also careful to interweave rather than collapse the historical processes I see at work in the formation of the sonic color line with the equally complicated, concurrent formation of a sonic glass ceiling. Although far from destiny, biology has a different valence in terms of gender and voice, binding voices in some degree to what Ehrick describes as “physiological parameters of comfortable pitch range” and “voice quality settings.” However, Ehrick also notes how “humans can and do place their voices in ways that are consistent with the performative aspects of gender.”54 As with race, the sound of a voice does not cause sexism, but rather sexism disciplines the cultural meanings attached to perceived gendered differences in the voice, impacting expressions of race and sexuality as well as assumptions of class. For instance, Liana Silva argues that loudness remains a male privilege in American culture, so women who wield loud voices are dubbed lower class and “noisy, rude, unapologetic, unbridled.” Silva calls attention to loudness’s special valence for women of color, whose raced identities raise the stakes of respectability politics. Women of color risk being marginalized by men of all races as well as white women, attuned to women of color’s expressions of loudness as hostile, immature, angry, less intelligent, and/or divisive. In a society bound by sonic color lines and glass ceilings, “loudness,” Silva contends, “is something racialized people cannot afford.”55 By theorizing listening as a medium for race and gender hierarchies, The Sonic Color Line contextualizes gendered voices within a wider soundscape of music and ambient sounds also subject to raced and gendered policing.
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Traversing multiple archives and utilizing more than one critical method, my interdisciplinary methodology uses archival, literary, and cultural analyses. Through intensive archival excavation and close reading, I “unair” sound and representations of listening in discursive sites where it is not usually looked for: novels, short stories, essays, newspaper coverage, letters, memoirs, etiquette manuals, and advertisements. Bruce Smith describes “unairing” as “acoustic archaeology,” a process of “learning to hear, and not just see” evidence embedded in written materials.56 I locate “unaired” literary sound and embed it in a historical context, tracing the sonic color line and the listening ear through readings that return a sense of proximity to events, people, and perspectives made distant and disparate by traditional archival practice. Through meticulous microhistory, I show how sounds come to us “already listened to,” whether we encounter
