The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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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 and reproducing only certain sounds the listening ear deems appropriate, pleasurable, and respectable.
Examining 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