The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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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 them in print, on recordings, or in our own ears. This book deliberately disrupts the border between “actual” and imagined sound, joining Moten and Smith, who argue that 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