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My research project is a broad cultural study of sound and racial formation in the United States. It presents a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of the socially constructed nature of listening, particularly how sound and listening collude to produce social and racial difference during the period between antebellum slavery and late Jim Crow. Vision has been a powerful influence in the construction of race; as a result, scholars have ignored how the other senses have acted both alone and in concert with visual racial discourses. Rather than reifying vision as totalizing, my book points out its epistemological gaps and stakes a claim for the importance of sound as a critical modality through which racist violence is (re)produced, apprehended, and resisted. Precisely because racism is thought to be a visual discourse, sound has become a repository of apprehension, oppression, and confrontation rendered secondary and/or invisible by visually-driven systems of comprehension. This book exposes linkages between sound and race in American culture, showing how racialized representations have contoured dominant listening practices and how listening has operated as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance in vision’s shadow. Building upon W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the visual color-line, I define the sonic color line as a socially constructed boundary where racial difference is produced, coded, and policed through the ear. In concert with the sonic color-line, I have developed the theoretical construct of the listening ear to understand the process by which individual auditory experience is normed by American dominant ideologies. Far from being vision’s binary opposite, sound frequently operates as visuality’s doppelgänger—its unacknowledged but ever-present “other”—in the construction of race and the performance of racial oppression. Through historically contextualized “close listenings” of audio and textual soundscapes from performers like Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Leadbelly, and Lena Horne; and writers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Charles Chesnutt, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry, my book amplifies how the macro-politics of race and gender become powerful lived historical experiences through the intimate micro-world of the senses.
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