Sounds Political: Listening to African American Literature, 1845-1903

Papanikolas, Antonio

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-x4yj-cb47

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Sounds Political: Listening to African American Literature, 1845-1903

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During the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods, Black authors were concerned with white antipathy towards the political aspirations of African Americans. For many of these authors, sonic figures of resonance, vibration, and musicality served as the key sensory modalities through which the nexus of American anti-Blackness and civil politics could be understood and critiqued. Sounds Political gives an account of the provenance and prospects of sonic imagery in Black political literary aesthetics; of the values attached to the sounds of oratory, the spiritual purchase attendant to voice, and the persuasive capacities ascribed to music. In my analysis, I apply close readings to works by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Pauline Hopkins, while situating these texts within historical discourses of sound, sensibility and political sympathy via the writings of figures such as Adam Smith, William Lloyd Garrison, and late nineteenth-century African American musicologist, James Monroe Trotter. I also turn to the periodical press, examining documents such as newspaper editorials discussing the clamor of antislavery declamation and biographical accounts celebrating the skills of famous Black vocalists. I argue that the sonic dimensions of the primary texts under consideration render audible the politicizing desires that had been dampened by a pervasive emphasis on visual re-presentation in antiracist literature and rhetoric. Sounds Political turns to both canonical and obscure works in the African American literary canon to argue that the seemingly arbitrary apprehension of voice and sound expressed the listener’s own complex orientation to Black emancipatory desires and impulses.

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