For Eidsheim, the acousmatic question – not ‘Who made that sound?’ but ‘What do I hear?’ – asks us to be aware of our propensity to hear race as an essence in Black voices and thus to fail to recognise that the distinctive tonality, pitch and timbre of those voices is not an essence but the product of specific histories and experiences: ‘enculturation, technique and style, and an infinity of unrealized manifestations’.⁶ What we hear is an effect of our preconceptions. We racialise Black voices.

In this chapter I argue that the racialisation of voices has a long history, which can be traced back to antiquity and the European Middle Ages and which still shapes the way that we hear a supposed ‘essence’ of race in voices today. By ‘racialisation’ I mean those practices and processes of race-making that belong to a time before the ‘invention’ of race as a concept and through which, in Geraldine Heng’s words, ‘essentialisms are posited and assigned … so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment’.⁷ Heng argues that by intentionally deploying the vocabulary of ‘race’ before the invention of race we will be able to bear witness to ‘the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices and institutions in the medieval period’ that would not otherwise be recognised as part of the history of race and racism.⁸ But I include more than the sound of race in that history. Judgements about whether a voice sounds ‘like the voice of a black man’ are also aesthetic judgements. At the end of this chapter I ask what it means to put race and poetics together at a moment in US history when Black people are struggling to breathe or are dying because the breath has been choked out of them.⁹

Heng’s metaphor – ‘the invention of race’ – turns on the double meaning of ‘invention’ that was common in medieval Latin and European vernaculars, as well as in antique and premodern rhetorical theory, namely the finding of something (an object; material for the composition of a text) and the act of reinvention that transforms that material into something new.¹⁰ The fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate, for example, remarked on the pleasure that poets take in ‘this the sotil fourme [skilful manner], / Be [By] newe invencioun thynges to transfourme’.¹¹ Poetic creation is not ex nihilo but is combinatory. It takes things that are known and turns them into a new object. Rhetorical invention traces a paradoxical movement of finding and repurposing, a movement that works both backwards and forwards in time. If the past furnishes material for the present, then the past is always in some sense intelligible to, and contemporaneous with, the present. Yet the transformational nature of invention means that neither the past nor the present is identical to each other or to themselves. Heng says that ‘the story of race … re-begins again and again’, as if that story were condemned to repeat itself in the same way that trauma repeats the past, but the repeated history of race does not mean that scholars today must always repeat the same story about it.¹²

One way to change that story is for academics to attune themselves to race’s social and institutional forms. Wan-Chuan Kao has recently called for white scholars in the field of medieval studies to ‘recognize’ medievalists of colour, intellectually, culturally and professionally – that is, to acknowledge them and their work, to cite them, to centre them, to honour them. He has also called for ‘a practice of … attunement that moves us from fragility to engagement, intention to investment, and identity to action’.¹³ Kao’s call to move the field in a direction that is ‘attuned’ to race is by no means an exclusively US issue. Britons played a major part in the history of US racism and are only now beginning in appreciable numbers to come to terms with their involvement in that history. As the US historian Annette Gordon-Reed observes, ‘American-style racism has a British pedigree’, one based in ‘English attitudes to race, particularly the negative views about blackness that Englishmen brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic to the New World’.¹⁴ Although I am still learning what it means to practise ‘a scholarship or pedagogy of recognition’ that does not replicate, in Kao’s words, ‘the blind spots’ of the past – the ‘governance of difference’, the political and institutional failure to address structures of inequality – I want to suggest that Schaeffer’s acousmatic question, which Eidsheim inflects in relation to Black voices, might be a metaphor for practising a pedagogy of recognition and attunement. When we hear race in Black voices as an essence, we either tune out the individual history and culture of Black people, or we tune them in only to misrecognise them as cultural stereotypes. The acousmatic question demands a listening that is engaged and intentional. It asks white people to listen better.

The racialisation of voices precedes the invention of race in the fifteenth century.¹⁵ The most salient form of that racialisation within late medieval western Europe is the characterisation by Christians of the voices of non-Christian peoples as inarticulate, and the comparison of their voices to those of nonhuman animals.¹⁶ The Dominican friar Simon of Saint-Quentin, a white, European Christian who accompanied Ascelin of Lombardy’s mission to the Mongol (Tatar) empire in central Asia in 1247 and who wrote an eyewitness account of that mission, compared the voices of non-Christian Mongols to the voices of bulls and wolves: ‘The Tartars [sic] speak in an argumentative and noisy manner from a fierce and horrible gullet; singing they bellow like bulls or howl like wolves, issuing forth inarticulate vocalisations in their singing.’¹⁷ As the musicologist Justin Stoessel notes, Simon’s dehumanising rhetoric is an instance of the ‘discourse of animality’, Cary Wolfe’s term for ‘the use of that constellation of signifiers to structure how we address others of whatever sort (not just nonhuman animals) … [which] has historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans – a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals’.¹⁸ In medieval Christendom, the discourse of animality operated as a racialising strategy, seeking (in Stoessel’s words) ‘through a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin West’s place in the world’ – that is, its pre-eminent place.¹⁹ Mel Chen addresses the racialising process within this discourse more directly than Wolfe, borrowing and adapting a linguistic term of ‘political grammar’ called an ‘animacy hierarchy’, a model that ‘conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority’.²⁰ Chen is concerned with the degrees of ‘liveness’ that these categories may be said to display, but uses ‘animacy’ rather than ‘life’, not only in order to undo binaries but also to trouble the distinctions between perceived degrees of animacy/intimacy within the genus homo, distinctions that sort human subjects into the human and the less than human.

As Stoessel notes, Simon of Saint-Quentin’s characterisation of the voices of his Tatar hosts as ‘inarticulate vocalisations’ had a precise meaning in thirteenth-century Latin Europe, one derived from the definitions of spoken utterances by late antique grammarians, including Donatus (fl. mid-fourth century CE) and Priscian (fl. 500 CE), who was, incidentally, from Caesarea, a Roman colony in Roman-Berber north Africa, now modern Algeria.²¹ In his taxonomy of vocal utterances (voces), Priscian sorts those vocalisations into a fourfold hierarchy according to their intelligibility: vox articulata (articul...