The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and, above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation.33
Within academia’s historically logocentric white supremacist structures, these thinkers launched new ways of conceiving of aesthetics, value, history, theory, and memory. But while they centralized music to reconceive black literary aesthetics, their analysis remained largely structural and metaphoric.34 Building from these broad strokes, scholars—guided by Daphne Brooks, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Fred Moten, Gayle Wald, and Weheliye—have recently retheorized the relationship between black performance practice and writing as mutually informative. This critical move enables contemporary scholars to engage with the sonics of black cultural production on a more granular level—a “search for resonances” in Emily Lordi’s terms and a “listening in detail” in Alexandra Vazquez’s methodology—within a wider social and historical context.35 Scholars can now listen to the unique ways in which African American artists mobilize sound beyond structuring principle and as so much more than an object: as event, experience, affect, archive, and, as Shana Redmond argues, method.36
By tracing a historical conversation between black writers and musicians about the racial politics of listening, this book makes three interventions in the study of African American literature. First, I amplify black performers and writers as theorists of listening, using aural imagery and musical strategies to explore listening as a form of agency, a technique of survival, an ethics of community building, a practice of self-care, a guide through racialized space, a site of racialization, and a mode of decolonizing. Second, current approaches to the sonics of African American literature have focused more intensely on literature and music considered explicitly “experimental,” beginning with the black arts movement. By locating my study in the hundred-year period just before the Civil Rights Movement, I break down the experimental/traditional binary, articulating what Mathes calls the “imaginative landscape of experimental sonority” in contemporary black writing with more “realist” forms, such as the slave narrative, framed vernacular tale, and social protest novel.37 By listening to works by writers such as Jacobs, Chesnutt, and Wright—and foregrounding how these authors conceived and represented listening itself—I argue that we can hear the radical aurality and sonic aesthetics of their work submerged by time, shifts in aesthetics, and limited readings of their artistry as sociological description and/or mere vehicles for racial liberalism. Earlier black writers and musicians experimented with aural imagery to radically challenge the mobilization