The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound
and maintained through the listening ear.
Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see "difference." At least
that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic
Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just
as dependent on what we hear--voices, musical taste, volume--as they are
on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about
the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical
research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound
and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but
actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of
sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of
racialized aural representations operating at the level of the
unseen--the sonic color line--and exposes the racialized listening
practices she figures as "the listening ear."
Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American
history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres--the slave narrative,
opera, the novel, so-called "dialect stories," folk and blues, early
sound cinema, and radio drama--The Sonic Color Line explores how black
thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during
slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs,
Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The
Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as
agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key
canonical works in African American literary history. In the process,
she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies.
The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and
resisted "race," so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.
